Dosbox Civilization Freezes

Thanks for the input, Whelman and msjmb.

I tried turning off "Instant advice", and there was no lock up. Great, but really wouldn't have thought it'd (the AI) have trouble keeping up at this early stage of the game.

In the mean time between last post and now, I dug out my old CIV disks - see attached image - and tried to do a new install. (Not that the installation batch files seem to work under DOSBox, but as they're just copy scripts, that's hardly much ask for manual installation. So, I just copied files across to a new CIV DIR.) When I opened the save in that version, no hang either.
Hmmm....
Inconsistancy, as all details of this CIV and my effective O/S haven't nominally changed.
It's working - good - but the reasons are still basically unknown - bad.

If you need version .05, it can be found here:

http://apolyton.net/civ1/files/updates/civv05.zip

The sound driver update is also available at the site. Take off the filename to browse the directory.

Whelkman, thanks for that link. I was looking to update after reading some of the threads here.

Hello, I'm currently playing the French Civ1 for DosBOX. This the first time this happens to me. I'm playing the French at Prince level and the game would freeze in 3 separate situations, in the same game, I have no idea why.

First, when I would change government, the game would freeze. So I stuck with Republic for the following turns. No problem for a long while, but it doesn't go away. I was no longer able to change government.

Then I wanted to buy the last Russian city (Leningrad, I captured Moscou). Again, the game would freeze. So I left it alone and resolved to conquer it later. I haven't attacked it yet.

Now it's 1979 and the game freezes when it's time to move units. I have disabled animations, advisors and enemy moves but it freezes nonetheless.

As for the questions:

1) What version of DOSbox are you using?
--> DOSBox 0.74
2) What version of CIV/DOS are you using?
--> 474.05. CRC is 1d997c34.
3) Are you sure that you have an unaltered CIV.EXE?
--> I really don't know how to discover this. Help please ?
These are my files I think
View attachment CIVIL3.MAP

View attachment CIVIL3.SVE

4) Are you using the English language version of CIV/DOS?
--> As I said, this is a French version.

Could you help me, please ?

Not sure why exactly, but your game save is somehow corrupt... the "Arctic anomaly" is present, as you can see in these screenshots:

On further investigation, I tried to open your savegame in JCivED, but it failed...

So then I opened the CIVIL3.MAP as PIC image, and we clearly see there are 2 artefacts on the geography layer and "land ownership" layer: the Hoover Dam and Women's Suffrage icons are partly duplicated, as shown below:



I am currently trying to fix your MAP file and see if it does the trick...

So why exactly does this happen? I've seen this so many times.

I fixed your MAP file ( View attachment CIVIL3.MAP ), and when the turn passes, you get the "Too many units" message, so I guess this is where you should look for improving your savegame, i.e. removing some units (ignore the weird Civ colors, they are remnants from CIV.EXE hacking):

Ah, thank you very much. I stopped some of my cities from building caravans and it worked just fine !

I have to admit it, I am used to the arctic anomaly as I tend to build loads and loads of units (diplomats, caravans and settler). Especially the two first given they don't cost any shield once built. But this is the first time it actually freezes my game. It never happened on Earth to me.

Buying the last city probably has to do with it, do you think it as also the reason of the government-changing-bug ?

Civ1 really is a fascinating game.

Toupie said:

Buying the last city probably has to do with it, do you think it as also the reason of the government-changing-bug ?

Click to expand...

Actually, I think that all of your problems have the same root cause: this "arctic anomaly"... In many CIV routines, there is background calculation that checks all units on the map, or some map squares, etc. so my guess is that this arctic anomaly just screws up any processing that occurs when you make a Revolution, or try to subvert Leningrad, or... whatever. But of course I may be wrong.

kirkham7 said:

So why exactly does this happen? I've seen this so many times.

Click to expand...

I don't know the reason so far... I remember reading insights (can't find them again right now) related to the CIV Score screen overflowing into the MAP memory area.
And actually, if you look at the CIV Score screen, you can see that icons for Hoover dams and Women's Suffrage have indeed the same relative positions to one another, they are also cropped to the same sizes:



Maybe CIV is erroneously using the MAP area as a temporary "icon cropping area" when displaying improvements in the score screen... This deserves some more investigation

I do remember that often times, if you have a lot of citizens and then bring up the F9 screen, then it does start to overwrite the map file... We have talked about this before.

Apparently The government-change-bug is not related to the arctic anomaly.

I've started a new game as the Romans on Earth and the game would freeze just the same when I want to go from Despotism to Monarchy, even though I've discovered only a piece of Earth.
I know that the arctic anomaly appears only at a certain point in the game and it's way too early to already be there I think.

This greatly annoys me, as something seems to have definitely corrupted my data so I'm no longer able to change government. I remember a friend a long time ago who had this problem. He wouldn't show me what the REVOLUTION! button does because it would bug the game. Anyway, it doesn't seem to be a very famous bug, unlike the advisor bug for example. Maybe it's a bug exclusive to the French version ? ).

I suppose there's a connection with the newspaper, cos' it doesn't show up when I try to change my government.

What's stranger is that the button worked just fine for quite a long time.

Here are my saving files and MAP.
Note: I've used DarkPanda hack to change the Civs colours and reallocate the F10 button ( ) but I don't think this is related, cos' the bug showed up before those changes.

Is the map overwriting bug the cause of "scorched earth"? That is, when reloading a game there are forts and pollution tiles all over the place. There's also the shifting of railways and cities:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=227534

I encountered a freeze during my current Civ1 game. At first, it happened during the 1832 turn. I resumed the game from my previous save (1818), saving now after every turn. This time, I got as far as finishing my 1828 turn, but during the AI turn the game just freezed during (or maybe after) the French moves.

DOSBox version is 0.74 (English)
Civ version is 474.05
Civ.exe is 305.030 bytes and timestamped 13 Oct 1992, 10:31:46 (not sure if it's unaltered, but I installed it from a purchased disk and never tried to tweak it myself)

Following advice earlier in thread, I already changed all unit production to improvements, but in this case the freeze still occurs reliably. I was looking forward to finish this game, so if it's possible (and not too much trouble) to fix it, I would be much obliged.

The save files should be attached.

Verrucosus said:

I encountered a freeze during my current Civ1 game. At first, it happened during the 1832 turn. I resumed the game from my previous save (1818), saving now after every turn. This time, I got as far as finishing my 1828 turn, but during the AI turn the game just freezed during (or maybe after) the French moves.

DOSBox version is 0.74 (English)
Civ version is 474.05
Civ.exe is 305.030 bytes and timestamped 13 Oct 1992, 10:31:46 (not sure if it's unaltered, but I installed it from a purchased disk and never tried to tweak it myself)

Following advice earlier in thread, I already changed all unit production to improvements, but in this case the freeze still occurs reliably. I was looking forward to finish this game, so if it's possible (and not too much trouble) to fix it, I would be much obliged.

The save files should be attached.

Click to expand...

Had a look at it, and found out that CIV is doing an endless loop while processing 2 French settlers located on the same map square.

While further investigating, I discovered that the cause of this endless loop is a screw-up in the unit stack IDs, i.e. the attribute that each unit has that links it to the next unit in its stack - the unit stack is the group of units located on the same square:

• In your game, the French have over 24 units in one of their cities, and many of those units are pointing to one of the 2 Settlers as their next unit in stack
• But the Settlers are not in the city, they are on a different squareand they point to each other as their next unit in stack
• Now, all stack processing routines perform a loop whose finishing condition is that they are processing the same unit ID as they started with (they close the loop)
• But in the situation described above, this simply never happens, because as soon as they reach the Settlers, the routine erroneously goes out of the original stack and into the 2-settler loop.

I fixed your game by cleaning up all unit stacks and stack IDs in the game (wrote a quick Java routine for that):

View attachment CIVIL2_stackfixed.MAP
View attachment CIVIL2_stackfixed.SVE

The next turn passes successfully, and I checked that after that turn, the stack is not screwed up. But even so, I am afraid I don't know how to prevent it from happening again in further turns, as I don't know the original cause in CIV.EXE for the unit stack screw-up in the first place...

Thank you so much. I've played until 1852 now without another error.

Hey I finally had a game freeze on me... Could you check it out and see what is going on? I took off the enemy moves and animations (always keep advisor off), but that didn't keep it from freezing. I've opened it up with both terraform and jCivED, but I don't see anything wrong with it.