Crash before entering game

Giver35

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 2, 2014
Messages
4
Hello, I am having a crippling issue with my copy of Civ 5. I played the vanilla game just fine, with zero issues. After I bought gold edition, I saw a few errors, but I was still able to play. The errors were of a graphical sort, a red and white checkerboard replaced AI leader screens from time to time.

After several hours playing gold edition, I upgraded once again to Brave New World, and started a game going. I was able to play for about two minutes when the game crashed, giving the "Civ 5 has encountered a problem and needs to close" error message. From that point on, I have been able to start a game very rarely, and the game usually crashes before the opening speech is finished.

I have tried several possible solutions, including updating my drivers and lowering graphic settings to minimum. I have verified the game cache a few times, and uninstalled/re-installed multiple times as well. I am at a loss as to what to try next, but I would dearly love to play Civ 5 some more.

Here is my DxDiag, if needed.

http://pastebin.com/2u1yzeih#
 
You may be getting corrupted files and the only thing to get passed that is to keep verifying the local cache, even after it says all files verified successfully. You also may be limited on the size of map you play on. Your system is limited being 32 bit and only 3 Gig of memory. It is relying on a swap file on the hard drive, which is putting strain on top of the already demanding Civ5.

What I found to work was to setup steam and all steam games on an 8 Gig or larger thumb drive. That seemed to cut down on corrupted files for me.
 
Thanks, I tried your suggestion and validated my cache five times (can't be too careful, I guess) Afterwards, I created a "tiny" sized map and was able to play for about an hour before it crashed again.

Are there perhaps any further measures I can take to reduce the strain further? Perhaps uninstalling some unused games would help?
 
How much available space do you have on your hard drive?
 
I have 440 Gigabytes free on my D drive, which is what I generally use for games and other programs. I reserve the C drive for system applications, and that drive has only 34.6 GB free.
 
Is there just one drive that is partitioned into C and D? Or are there two actual drives?

If there are two drives, then you are stuck, because you have pretty much maxed your options without going to a 64 bit system and putting at least 8 Gig of ram in it. Another thing is your motherboard may not support 8 Gig of RAMM.

If there is just one drive and it is partitioned, I would try getting a 8 Gig thumb drive and put steam and all games on it. Not only is the drive being bogged down with swap writes, but it is also doing read and writes for two different partitions. If you have a lot of steam games, then you need to add up all the space required to make sure your thumb drive is big enough. I have seen steam take up most of a 64 Gig drive just by itself.

Your drives seem to have ample space, so that is not an issue. The issue is just how much reading and writing your hard drive is doing and Civ5 with BNW is very taxing.

The only other option is getting a stronger graphics card to take some of the load off of the CPU, but then you have to make sure your power supply is adequate.
 
Thanks for your help! :) I guess it is time for an upgrade... Windows XP is about ready to lose Microsoft support anyhow. I may try the thumb drive suggestion in the mean time.
 
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