Consistent, Reproducable crashing bug in 1.16f

I am playing a large game which is mostly over, I control about half the world. I am finishing up conquering the Babylonians, and I have run into a crashing bug that I can't seem to get around.

When I capture one of the Babylonians last cities, or accept their surrender (I have tried both), the Babylonians declare war on the English, and then the game crashes. This happens immediately when they surrender, or during their turn when I capture one of their last cities.

I have even gone back several turns and stopped the war against the Babylonians early, but they still eventually declare war on the English and crash the game.

This declaration of war seems to be part of the bug: I have tried getting them to go to war with each other early so as to avoid the crash, but neither side "would ever accept such a deal," not even a trade embargo. Also the Babylonians are seriously hurt at this point in the game, it makes no sense for them to declare war on the English.

I am running Civ 1.16f on a Pentium3-600 w/256 megs of RAM on Win98SE. I have an nvidia card, all the latest drivers for everything, and I have no background applications running.

If any Firaxis employees are reading this, I have several save games ranging from 5 turns before the crash to immediately before the crash... If it would help, I can send them to anybody who could debug this problem. I'll stick them in a seperate folder so they won't get overwritten when I play a new game.

It really sucked, this is the first large game I've played since installing the 1.16f patch, and it doesn't seem like I'll be able to finish it. I don't see any other people complaining about crashes, so hopefully this won't happen to me the next time I play.

Please contact me if you want the savegames to debug!

Jim Faulkner

I get the same error, also when one AI civ is declaring war on the other. I've reloaded several saved games and they all crashed in the same spot. I, also, can post saved game files that recreate the error.

I have a pentium 800 with Geforce2 card, plenty of RAM and HD space. I plaved several games before the patch and never had the problem. Now I do.

I have what sounds like the same problem. Fortunately for me (I suppose), it happened to me early in the first game I played, but now again a little farther along in the second.

The first time it happened, one of my rivals had built a city practically on top of a colony of mine, which wiped out the colony (I only learned at that moment that this would happen!), but the unit that was still guarding it was then in enemy territory. When the nervy foreign despot challenged me to get my troops out of his territory, I refused and declared war. The crash happened shortly thereafter. I don't remember now whether there were any other declarations of war between third parties before the crash, but there might have been.

The more recent event happened during a turn when one AI empire declared war on another. I don't think (?) it was the first time that had happened, but it hadn't been long since. When I'm home tonight I'll look it up and confirm whether AI declarations were involved in both crashes.

I have submitted my problem to the Infogrames support people, but haven't heard anything in approaching 48 hours.

I was just bit by this bug also and had to check the forums to see if I was the only one. While Im not happy to hear that Im not the only one.

I crash at a specific turn when the french declare war on the japanese.

my error message is

Civilization3.e.exe has generated an error and will be closed by Windows


*arr*

Just be sure you report the problem to Infogrames. I hope by now they realize they have a problem, but they haven't made any public acknowledgment to this point, as far as I know.

Originally posted by BradC
Just be sure you report the problem to Infogrames. I hope by now they realize they have a problem, but they haven't made any public acknowledgment to this point, as far as I know.

Click to expand...

It's happening to me as well.

I loaded the latest version of the 1.16f patch ( apparently the pre 12-7-2001 vresion had the wrong exe in it ), but it still crashed.

Damm I have the same problem on a large map
English declare war against the babylonians. that same turn civlization3.e.exe has generated errors
on w2k with amd1.2G GF2
I have lots of save games of the build up, i guess i will go back and try to change the events leading to the english war

anyone have a fix?! please

I wish I had a fix. It may not happen every time, or it may happen every time a war is declared by AI. Has anyone seen a war declared by AI on AI and not had the crash?

If anyone is running and not having this problem, maybe we can narrow down the cause to something particular in our systems.

I've tried all the usual tricks to get around this bug (updating drivers, reinstall game, directx etc. and a whole slew of other stuff) and nothing more can be done. This narrows it down to two things: Either the copy protection is causing it or, more likely, a bug in the program that will have to be addressed with another patch. It could be that the game will not work with certain chipsets as it is. I have a Via Apollo chipset. Is anyone experiencing this "war" bug that has a different chipset?

Same bug here.

In my game the Greeks (a hopelessly tiny nation) attacked the Russians (the most powerful nation). Both nations are AI controlled.

I wonder if the relative size of the nations has anything to do with the problem. If it is always a tiny nation attacking a large nation, then I would think that there is an overflow/wrap-around bug in the AI code.

Despiser -- I also have a Via Apollo chipset

BradC -- I've seen the AI declare war on the AI many times without running into this problem.

Has anyone had a response from Infogrames tech support?

Originally posted by Reave
Same bug here.

Click to expand...

The bug hits me during AI turns after I have large map games taken into the late Industrial Age. I don't see a message indicating that there's been an AI declaration of war, but it's possible.

Frustrating, as I'd like to finally see the Modern Age, and I can't.

CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module CIVILIZATION3.EXE at 0187:004f6de2.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0187 EIP=004f6de2 EFLGS=00010246
EBX=00613a1c SS=018f ESP=00abfbf0 EBP=00000001
ECX=0e954d48 DS=018f ESI=80007fff FS=3a37
EDX=00000000 ES=018f EDI=000000e6 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
66 89 30 8b 8b 3c 08 00 00 8b 74 24 1c 47 c1 f9
Stack dump:
00613a1c 00000000 0000001f 0efb4be4 0000000f 00000010 004f6c8c 000000e5 0f6c345c 0000001f 0000007f 000000ff 0000001f 000000fd 0000000c 00000101

I agree sometimes (in the same game different save, about 5 turns before) it will crash but without the war declaration. I suspect it crashes before it can give the war is declared message.

still no reply from firaxis, all I want is confirmation of this error and that they are looking at it.

i've had the same problems as all of you. this has happened to me on several games now, all POST-patch. and since the games have been played with the patch, i can't go back and play them without the patch. it really sucks to invest so much time in a game only to be completely stuck and helpless.

W2K SP2, AMD 1GHz, 512MB RAM, VIA chipset, DirectX 8, nvidia GeForce 2 Ultra

my patience is wearing quite thin with this. i've tried going back to saved games and changing circumstances, but that has only worked once, and made me completely change my strategy, which is not something i'm happy about.

- philip

PS -- i gave my game file to my brother to try on his laptop (IBM thinkpad), and it still crashed in the same spot. i'm not sure of all his specs, but i know he was running Win98SE with the 1.16 version of CivIII. does this mean that the game file became corrupted? if the same file crashes in the same place on two completely different CPUs... [firaxis can finish this sentence for me]

- philip

Bump

Looks like something wrong with the Via chipset. From my own experience, the crash occurs in the late industrial era when war is declared. I've noticed others with this same condition. What a fun job for the programmers if or when they find this bug.

I have exactly the same problem running in Win2K and WIn98SE.
The program will just crash during the AI turn, I am alos at the end of the industrial age...no matter what I do the crash just happen...
I hope Firaxis will fix this asap....my patient is also wearing very thin....

Please report all info about your crash to www.civ3.com support. List every detail about the crash to ensure a fix in future patches. Thanks... And remember if they fix it for you, they fix it for everyone... Hopefully....

Is there something wrong with the autosave function? I have not tried it without this enabled but I am going to try today. I have three autosave games that crash anytime I completely end my turn and the AI starts theirs. Is this when the autosave tries to function? I have reinstalled the game many times, installed new drivers, old drivers, booted up with no startup programs, closed them all after startup, done just about everything I can think of and I still get the same error message at the same point. The message is "Civilization 3 has caused an error in CIVILIZATION3.EXE and will now close. If you continue to experience problems try restarting your computer." and it gives me a close button.
My system specs are:
Dell XPS B1000
1 gig Intel
256 mb ram
NVIDIA TNT2 M64 4XAGP
SBLive Value!
40 gig HD
Windows ME
The save files are too large to attach here (approx. 2 meg each) and there was no place to attach them when I contacted firaxis. But I am curious. Why do I have to jump through these hoops for a 'new' game? I could understand if this were some ancient DOS game. (I have one, it's not ancient but it's DOS, that I am currently trying to get to work.) Anyway, if someone could give me a heads up I would appreciate it.

After investigating further I discovered that it is not the autosave function because it crashed in the middle of a turn, unless of course the autosave functions at this point in time. Oh btw the exact wording of the message I keep getting is "Civilization3 has caused an error in CIVILIZATION3.EXE. Civilization3 will now close. If you continue to experience problems, try restarting your computer." And the "Close" button. I can still get two of the save games I have to crash at the same instant every time but the latest one managed to make it past the crash in 110 bc only to crash a few turns later in 70 bc. I am going batty and my wife has threatened to send the game back the next time I go to work as I am becoming difficult to live with. :crazyeyes I certainly hope I can get this resolved.