Missionary Bug (I am ready to quit on Civ IV)

Yet another bug I found/developed today. When I try to use a missionary to convert a town of mine, the game crashes to the desktop. I have tried this twice now with two different civilizations (Chinese and Romans). The same thing happens. I hit the 'convert', and the game crashes to desktop. I even made a save of Chinese game, and am attaching it. I can attached the Roman one too, if someone wants to see it. This is a gamestopping bug, and least the first few times I saw it, before I figured out what was going on. Now, I can either choose not to use missionaries (which is a pain if going for a cultural victory), or I can just not play the game. In the attached save, I have two missionaries near the NW city... one hindu and one jewish. Using either to try to convert the religion-less city will crash me to desktop.

I did not have this issue last week. I don't know how I have suddenly developed it, but there it is, suddenly. I used missionaries until today, now they crash my game to desktop.

In addition, and as a side note, I am just about finished trying to make Civ IV work, at least for the moment. To date, I still can't get any tech support on fixing the problem with the sound in this game. The introductory movie and all the wonder movies 'blink' in and out in two second intervals: The sound plays for two seconds, then doesn't play for two seconds, and repeats this cycle for the length of the movie.

I have all the latest drivers. I've sat on the line with the tech support people at Take 2 for about 4 hours now, divided among three seperate occasions. On the latest occasion, I finally got tech support to send me an e-mail requesting my dxdiag. This was on Friday. I haven't recieved a reply yet. I sent a reminder e-mail today. Still no reply.

I have reformatted my machine. I have reinstalled all my drivers (of course), making sure (by calling the manufacturors) that I have the latest drivers. Still, I have the sound problem, and if I attempt to play the game on maps larger than standard, the lag is hell. My machine is above the specs posted for this game.

I have moved well beyond frustrated. But I am weary. If I don't get some real help soon from Take 2, I am just going to probably put the game away for 4 or 5 months and then take it out after some patches have been made.

Thanks for letting me rant.

If anyone is interested in my dxdiag, I have attached it as well.

Ok, I know it is odd to reply to my own post, but here goes. I kept working on this problem after posting, and discovered what was causing the problem, and how to fix it.

I uninstalled my DVD/CD drive, and then reinstalled it, on a hunch, and that fixed the problem.

It turns out that the very latest drivers for my DVD/CD drive must conflict with the game. If I use the standard, default, drivers (the ones that Windows autoinstall thinks are best, instead of the ones available from the manufacturer), the game plays as it did last week.

The audio problems remain, and I am manually resetting the random number generator number in my ini file before each game so I can get a random map, but at least I get the missionaries to work.

Strange stuff, I also have some lookups and movie problems, but it have never crashed for me, I'm very thankful for that

however, Since the reviews and sales of Civilization4 is way up, I belive there will be alot of Patches and Expansions for this game, More then for Civ3, and that game turned out okay

I am more then confident that civ4 will be a smooth game in the end

Correlation does not mean causation.... I changed my DVD/CD drivers, and the problem was fixed, but that does not mean the problem lay with my DVD/CD drivers. I started another game, and got the same problem again. Then I read this thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140757 I realized that every one of the games I've been playing have been using a Tilted Axis map. So, now I am leaning towards the hypothesis that this missionary bug is really a tilted axis bug. I guess the easiest fix is just not to play tilted axis maps any more (which sucks!!!!!@#$!@#$).

I had the exact same problem with a game and its saves. The problem went away when I started a new game and deleted my cache and autosaves folder.

I now still have random crashes with worker actions on random games though.

I did nothing to my system.