Civ4 Errors: Your observations/Solutions

[borghuman]

I created this thread to report specific game related errors and solutions. Please don't submit replies talking about unrelated issues, rantings about your problems, or discussions about building a game machine, etc., unless they are reports of actual errors or working solutions to errors. I hope this thread will make the error reporting and solution-finding process smoother. Try and label your solutions accordingly so that people can easily find answers without reading this whole thread. I would hope somebody could also accumulate, combine, and submit all this information to Firaxis/Take2 at some point so that these problems can ultimately be fixed.

My error submission:


Game: Civilization IV

Version: Patched v1.52

Purpose: In order to assist in the continued improvement of Civilization IV I have compiled a list of my observations of
errors or areas of concern presented in the game in a continued list as I found them.

Notes:
These problems are not confined just to one PC. These problems have occurred on several PCs I own after the installation of the latest game patch. Errors that the game had out-of-box, that the patch did not correct, are also included. I own 2 copies of Civ4 which both show signs of the same problems, i.e. it is not a faulty install from a bad CD.

1- Game restarts computer when starting at “Loading Imp / Voice” with and without the patch on some PCs. Windows XP Pro reports non-executable memory error and unspecified error/exception.
2- Turns to complete city improvements, technologies, etc., are displayed in several locations throughout the game. For example, turns to complete a technology are displayed in the tech tree and on the tech bar. The trouble is that each report of turns left is different and varies by tens and hundreds of turns depending on where you are looking.
3- Some leader’s face textures no longer look right during trade. Peter, for example, has parts of his face missing. It looks as if he has a skin disease where pixels are missing.
4- The game will randomly select the same play map multiple times in a row after patch install, especially if random seed is selected.
5- Weird AI activity after patch install. Mansa Mursa, for example, in one of my games, was restricted to noble difficulty and my difficulty was set to settler. Mursa researched half of all technologies in 1 turn during the game, ran the board and won in less than 150 turns. There were all 18 civs on the map. This never happened again. The personalities are also always randomized when that is disabled.
6- Symantec’s Norton Internet Security 2005 asks via a popup to allow DNS connectivity of Civ IV when connecting to multiplayer. This crashes Civ IV after patch install with the latest updates for Norton installed.
7- Health bars not visible in battle anymore.
8- Game passwords do not work after patch install. When passwords are set, to protect a civ, for example, entering them later always returns the error “password incorrect” when it is not.
9- The game options menu is inaccessible in multiplayer. It requires an admin password even when no password was set. (Internet Games).
10- There doesn’t appear to be a way for the game host to restrict the usage of pause or other settings in the game or to kick a player from a game which results in players abusing game play options. This has ruined many games online with spamming users commandeering pause and other hot keys to bring a game to a halt.
11- Is there a way to ignore users in chat? Doesn’t appear to be or the option to block a user from contact. The manual is also very vague and is no help in resolving any problems, including that one.
12- Sometimes setting continents to a specific number results in random continent numbers instead. For example, selecting 4 continents yields Pangaea.
13- Trading world maps can crash the game by freezing it.
14- Internet games crash after about 4-6 hours for no reason. The error message is “Civ4.exe has encountered a problem and will now close.” Happens every time during turn ending.
15- Game play is random after patch install. After I installed the patch, specific civ abilities don’t seem to apply. Everyone seems to have a random personality/ability when random personalities is turned off. One game I was easily able to create military, the next, money, for no apparent reason, and it didn’t feel right anymore. I always play Persia and know how they perform, but not anymore. Persia is supposed to be creative, but half the time they aren’t anymore and research last.
16- Some technologies do not turn green when researched in the tech tree anymore. Sometimes the game will leave the last tech blue and stop displaying anymore techs in green.
17- Hills defense and similar bonuses are non-existent and sometimes reversed.
18- After patch install, some games will not allow promotion of units anymore. Promotions seem to be disabled.
19- After patch install, units no longer prompt for or auto upgrade to new abilities. Only affects human players. This problem disappeared after a few games and then returned.
20- Sometimes information displayed on mouse-over is for something else and sometimes information does not display. For example, in the city details, mouse-over buy button shows cost to purchase the current improvement, but sometimes the information will not show or information regarding the world map tile behind the city screen will show instead.
21- After patch install, chat window does not allow you to type into it for 2 or 3 turns in the middle of a game sometimes.
22- All aircraft go to sleep on game save-exit-reload.
23- Religion out of reach for some civs like Persia and can be easily monopolized 100% by a few civs, making game play oddly unbalanced and cultural victory pointless as 1 civ is guaranteed to win in turn 1.
24- Ships turn and sail at a 45* angle. Sometimes they get stuck like that and won’t stand back up straight.
25- Queen Elizabeth sometimes looks “too-fat” after patch install. Also has missing pixels in face.
26- Game launch sometimes freezes when loading python/init.
27- Patch did not improve memory performance. None of my computers showed any significant change in memory usage after installing the patch.
28- Game patch install freezes some Windows XP and sometimes must be completed twice because the installation will promptly exit in the middle of installation with no error messages.
29- Game windows sometimes pop-up over one another semi-transparently and prevent anything from being clicked, for example: while working in a city, someone will contact you, preventing you from working in the city, but since the options for trade are partially covered too, trade is impossible. Hitting enter will sometimes remove the city view, but leave diplomatic options hidden.
30- Some great people report they can automatically discover a technology and then only apply research toward it when you use them. Other people report they can add +X research toward a tech. Great engineers same way with hurrying production.

31- Auto-save doesn’t always save.

32- Some computers, for no reason, never have oil on their player’s continent/island, etc. This is restricted to a computer, and is very odd. It was confirmed after 4 games in a row that one PC never allowed oil on its players’ continent.
33- Great people sometimes disappear after proper save, shutdown, reload after patch install.
34- If game is saved and then exited by ending the program from the task bar, the last saved game is reverted automatically to the second-to-last saved state.
35- Some boats disappear after patch install. All there is is a flag in the water where the boat goes.
36- New ships don’t appear in cities anymore after they are built. The only way you know they are there is when they auto-select and you can see their controls.
37- Some naval units become blurry and alternate between that and normal, almost like their flashing in and out of a cloaking device. It appears to have something to do with the layered textures and objects/other units being in front of or behind the units phasing in and out. Almost like they’re fighting for top layer of graphics. This occurs mostly when units are at rest and within 1 square of another object or unit. Happens on all quality modes.
38- Units placed into a transport sometimes disappear, even after patch install.
39- In one game I was playing after patch install, I had ~30 Riflemen, and my enemy had ~8 spearmen. I lost all 30 riflemen to them. That didn’t seem correct to me. All the riflemen were promoted, and their health increased because of fortification. The enemy cities had defenses reduced to 0% by my catapults. Battle odds showed numbers like 40 vs 8.2 against them.
40- Unit grouping doesn’t work so well after patch install. When you drop a new unit onto a stack of units, it auto-groups them, selects the group, and places the group to sleep while selected, but, after you awaken and refortify the group, it asks to fortify the new unit alone again. It’s kind of odd.
41- All units have the ability to assault amphibiously without limit.
42- Patch makes the usage of memory on some PCs worse. Esp. PCs with Celeron processors.
43- Game can’t function on Athlon 64 PCs. Is very slow and unplayable. Video playback causes the game to crash with multiple graphics cards including GeForce FX6200.
44- According to DirectX, everything is fine, when it isn’t. DirectX errors have not occurred on any of my PCs.
45- Game sometimes highly fragments hard drives after short play time. 37% after 15 minutes on one PC. Doesn’t always do this.
46- The installation CD is actually the Install and Play CD. The Play CD is disk 2 of installation only and has only 1 small archive on it. It is not the play disc.
47- Game patch may cause major problems in Windows XP.
3 PCs free of Spyware and Viruses containing Windows XP and Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005,
main programs, were loaded with Civ 4 and the patch separately, to test which PC would run it best. Some PCs immediately showed problems, others within 2 executions of the game. These PCs showed no previous signs of hardware or software problems. The problems were: Computer 1- AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 768MB Memory, Windows XP Home Problem- Computer restarts randomly. Freezing occurs during game play. Computer 2- Athlon XP 2500+, 1024MB Memory, Windows XP Pro Problem: Computer experiences freezing, slow start-up, occasional random restart. Computer 3: Windows XP Home problem- Computer restarts randomly.

48- When in a multiplayer game, if you hit escape and click on game options, the game asks you for an admin password even though no password was previously set. Entering nothing or anything, including the computer’s admin password returns the error “The password you entered is incorrect.”
49- When players disconnect from a game, sometimes the game freezes for no reason. Chat still works, but the game never stops saying that the player is disconnecting. When exiting, the game sometimes prompts that your gamespy account is already in use when you attempt to log back in until the game is restarted.
50- Sometimes the game will hang when loading, even when all player pings are good. Sometimes, the game will remove a player, either after a vote or when they retire, but, the game will continue to display “waiting for xplayer to return to game” even though it has already stated that they have retired, that they have left the game or that they have been removed from the game.
51- Sometimes your civilization’s units will for no reason convert to or train in the colors of an enemy civilization. For example, Persia’s color is teal, but some workers are produced in fuchsia, the color of Rome, which is on the map, while all other units are the correct color.
52- Sometimes, when more than 5 people are playing a game, the game will not properly create a map. Selecting a standard map of continents with 7 people, each person with 1 continent, for example, will yield a 2 continent map with everyone on one continent or a balance between the 2.
53- Some players have claimed to me that turning on “no cheating” in multiplayer can cause the game to crash. I have had this happen once with a particular set of players, all patched, for no apparent reason.
54- Starting technologies are different in multiplayer, but I think I remember the manual saying that that was caused by the differences that there may be in difficulty level you select between games.
55- Many websites talk about Civ4 being released on DVD. Where does this come from? My Special Edition copy is on CD and so is every other copy I’ve seen. I cannot find anyone who knows anything about a DVD version of the game. Did it come out on DVD anywhere?
56- The game website isn’t updated very often. The developer blog has ended. The game is still in post production, i.e. with the SDK tool, isn’t it?
57- I may have already mentioned this, but sometimes the game will stop accepting commands from the keyboard, disabling the ability to type in chat during game play, for example. Usually, after a few turns, everything will return to normal, but, in worst case situations, the game must be restarted.
58- On my Athlon 64 PC with 768MB of memory, the game will act slowly during some turns, and, during game play, when building a city, for example, the game will enter a loop where the sound keeps repeating and the image on the screen is frozen for several seconds to minutes. Other games and programs function more smoothly on this same computer than they do on lesser PCs, as they should, indicating to me that it is not the non-64 bit Windows XP or the Athlon64 processor, but the game itself causing the problems.
59- When I was playing online the other day, I moved a transport across the ocean to an opponent’s continent, unloaded a troop, and the next turn, used that troop to attack the enemy city there. However, instead of simply attacking the city, the troop boarded the transport, sailed across the ocean, got out, shot his gun, got back in the transport, sailed back to the enemy continent, got out, and then died. Several batches of troops going over later, another unit basically did the same thing, but instead of sailing back and forth on the transport, the troop ran across the ocean and back! His little footprints were even making on the water behind him with little pools under them, as if he was programmed with visual effects as if he were suppose to be able to run on water! It was a rifleman and a guerilla that did this, but I have had other units do it before, including a tank.

 

[MrCynical]

A little hard to know where to start with all this lot, but you have a number of very bizarre errors here that I haven't seen anywhere else.

2- Turns to complete city improvements, technologies, etc., are displayed in several locations throughout the game. For example, turns to complete a technology are displayed in the tech tree and on the tech bar. The trouble is that each report of turns left is different and varies by tens and hundreds of turns depending on where you are looking.

Nothing should be varying by hundreds of turns to start with. Are you sure you're reading the number of turns in every case, not the number of points that have been put towards it, or remain to be put towards it? I can't duplicate this and haven't seen it anywhere else.

4- The game will randomly select the same play map multiple times in a row after patch install, especially if random seed is selected.

I think there's a a work around for this problem in the bug reports forum.

5- Weird AI activity after patch install. Mansa Mursa, for example, in one of my games, was restricted to noble difficulty and my difficulty was set to settler. Mursa researched half of all technologies in 1 turn during the game, ran the board and won in less than 150 turns. There were all 18 civs on the map. This never happened again. The personalities are also always randomized when that is disabled.

The AI always plays at noble unless you alter it. Personaltiies are always randomized when what is disabled? How could you tell Mansa Musa got all that tech in one turn? I haven't seen anything like this, and there are a number of possible in game explanations for suddenly gaining a lot of tech.

7- Health bars not visible in battle anymore.

Patching tends to reset your options to default. You may need to turn health bars back on again in the game options.

15- Game play is random after patch install. After I installed the patch, specific civ abilities don’t seem to apply. Everyone seems to have a random personality/ability when random personalities is turned off. One game I was easily able to create military, the next, money, for no apparent reason, and it didn’t feel right anymore. I always play Persia and know how they perform, but not anymore. Persia is supposed to be creative, but half the time they aren’t anymore and research last.

This really doesn't sound like a problem with the game, more with your understanding of it. Civs cannot simply lose their traits and your descriptions are too vague to indicate there's an actual error occuring. Creative has nothing to do with research as you seem to be implying?

17- Hills defense and similar bonuses are non-existent and sometimes reversed.

Units that don't get defensive bonuses won't get bonuses from hills. There are no circumstances where bonuses are reversed. This sounds like another misunderstanding to me.

18- After patch install, some games will not allow promotion of units anymore. Promotions seem to be disabled.
19- After patch install, units no longer prompt for or auto upgrade to new abilities. Only affects human players. This problem disappeared after a few games and then returned.

Also seems vague and nebulous, I'd check the ingame options haven't reset something again.

23- Religion out of reach for some civs like Persia and can be easily monopolized 100% by a few civs, making game play oddly unbalanced and cultural victory pointless as 1 civ is guaranteed to win in turn 1.

Any Civ can get a religion, particularly at the lower levels where it's perfectly possible for the human player to get 7. I'd file this under misunderstanding game rules.

32- Some computers, for no reason, never have oil on their player’s continent/island, etc. This is restricted to a computer, and is very odd. It was confirmed after 4 games in a row that one PC never allowed oil on its players’ continent.

4 games is not confirmation, just bad luck. 40 might be indicative of something. I can't see anything that would cause this.

39- In one game I was playing after patch install, I had ~30 Riflemen, and my enemy had ~8 spearmen. I lost all 30 riflemen to them. That didn’t seem correct to me. All the riflemen were promoted, and their health increased because of fortification. The enemy cities had defenses reduced to 0% by my catapults. Battle odds showed numbers like 40 vs 8.2 against them

People always complain about bad luck, but this would be very unusual. A rifleman cannot possibly have an attack of 40 though. Fortification is also irrelevant for an attacker.

41- All units have the ability to assault amphibiously without limit.

Well all I can say is, they can't on mine, I ahven't heard of anyone else with anything like this.

43- Game can’t function on Athlon 64 PCs. Is very slow and unplayable. Video playback causes the game to crash with multiple graphics cards including GeForce FX6200

The wonder movies can be turned off in the Civ4.ini file if they are causing crashes

45- Game sometimes highly fragments hard drives after short play time. 37% after 15 minutes on one PC. Doesn’t always do this.

I'm not sure how Civ 4 could do this. Are you running a really huge amount of virtual memory?

46- The installation CD is actually the Install and Play CD. The Play CD is disk 2 of installation only and has only 1 small archive on it. It is not the play disc.

Some copies had these two labelled the wrong way round. I don't think this is really something that's going to get a solution beyond "swap them over" though.

53- Some players have claimed to me that turning on “no cheating” in multiplayer can cause the game to crash. I have had this happen once with a particular set of players, all patched, for no apparent reason.

There is a known issue where "no cheating" may cause crashes or prevent a game being loaded. Don't turn this on for multiplayer games, since it doesn't do anything in them anyway.

54- Starting technologies are different in multiplayer, but I think I remember the manual saying that that was caused by the differences that there may be in difficulty level you select between games.

It sounds like you're playing on very low difficulty levels, so you'll be starting with bonus techs that you won't get in multiplayer.

55- Many websites talk about Civ4 being released on DVD. Where does this come from? My Special Edition copy is on CD and so is every other copy I’ve seen. I cannot find anyone who knows anything about a DVD version of the game. Did it come out on DVD anywhere?

The European version is on a single DVD.

59- When I was playing online the other day, I moved a transport across the ocean to an opponent’s continent, unloaded a troop, and the next turn, used that troop to attack the enemy city there. However, instead of simply attacking the city, the troop boarded the transport, sailed across the ocean, got out, shot his gun, got back in the transport, sailed back to the enemy continent, got out, and then died. Several batches of troops going over later, another unit basically did the same thing, but instead of sailing back and forth on the transport, the troop ran across the ocean and back! His little footprints were even making on the water behind him with little pools under them, as if he was programmed with visual effects as if he were suppose to be able to run on water! It was a rifleman and a guerilla that did this, but I have had other units do it before, including a tank.

There are a number of known graphical glitches which can cause units to appear to do odd things like walking on water. The actual units are doing the correct thing, but the graphics are whatever reason going wrong.

Do you mind if I give a little feedback on this thread? You have a number of things here which as I've pointed out seem to be game misunderstandings, not bugs. There are several more which are also suspect (I can't duplicate them, and haven't seen anything like them reported anywhere else). There are some which I know are issues, which I've had personally, or have heard reports of. I'll give a quick run down of which are known problems.

The following problems definitely do exist: 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 16, 21, 24, 27, 42, 46, 47, 53, 58, 59.

The following definitely do not exist and are misunderstandings: 2, 5, 15, 17, 23, 39, 41, 54

There are also a few like 46, 55 and 56 which are not strictly speaking game issues.

Several of the rest are basically the same problem of the game slowing to crashing point. There are some problems which I've never heard of, but sound vaguely plausible, and a few where I'm not sure what you're saying. To be blunt I doubt many people are going to bother to plough through all this lot.

 

[borghuman]

I appreciate all your comments, please do post feedback. I do intend everyone to alter my list and present items for deletion, but let me explain some of my post to clarify. I would also emphasise that my list was not completely a list of errors, but also a list of proposed changes/alterations. I do understand that most people won't read all this, but I was hoping that some committed person might and at least think about it.

First, where you say that I may be having a misunderstanding of the game rules, I must emphasise the exact nature of these problems. If you could see some of them, I think you would agree that they don't seem "right." Some computers, for example, do not have any of these problems. I compiled the list after testing the game on 4 different PCs now between multiple people.

53- Some players have claimed to me that turning on “no cheating” in multiplayer can cause the game to crash. I have had this happen once with a particular set of players, all patched, for no apparent reason.

Everyone says this, but I leave it on every game and almost never does it crash a game. To me, it seems that someting else is crashing the games, not the no cheating option.

45- Game sometimes highly fragments hard drives after short play time. 37% after 15 minutes on one PC. Doesn’t always do this.

I simply don't understand this one, and no, I am letting Windows manage VM.

43- Game can’t function on Athlon 64 PCs. Is very slow and unplayable. Video playback causes the game to crash with multiple graphics cards including GeForce FX6200

I mainly have a problem with the Athlon64 CPUs here. For some reason, on my Athlon 64 PCs, the game runs really slow and is unplayable. This does not occur on my 32bit PCs including those with AMD Athlon XP CPUs.

41- All units have the ability to assault amphibiously without limit.
This only occurs on my AthlonXP 2500+ 1GB Memory, BIOSTAR MB PC. I can show you. My brother didn't believe it either until I assaulted amphibiously with an archer and a rifelman onto his 1 tile island city and took it.

39- In one game I was playing after patch install, I had ~30 Riflemen, and my enemy had ~8 spearmen. I lost all 30 riflemen to them. That didn’t seem correct to me. All the riflemen were promoted, and their health increased because of fortification. The enemy cities had defenses reduced to 0% by my catapults. Battle odds showed numbers like 40 vs 8.2 against them

I admit that this one was posted of memory and that the stregnth numbers I stated are of, but it was very unusual. This kind of activity started showing up after I installed the patch.

I would agree on #32 with you about the oil if I hadn't played 9 games since I wrote that in my Word Document and had it happen again. I kept telling my friend he was crazy over it too, that he didn't have the oil technology yet, until he showed me each time and oil did not exist on any of his continents.

23- Religion out of reach for some civs like Persia and can be easily monopolized 100% by a few civs, making game play oddly unbalanced and cultural victory pointless as 1 civ is guaranteed to win in turn 1.

What I mean here is that the way the game arranges the tech trees for each Civ, if all 18 civs were playing and each player aimed for religion only, civs like Persia are almost never able to achieve a religion before another civ. I think that this also has to do with starting locations as I know that the game alters turns to completion based on the exact arrangement of the land around you when you start. You can see this by doing the same things at the start of multiple games and watching the outcomes each time.

18- After patch install, some games will not allow promotion of units anymore. Promotions seem to be disabled.
19- After patch install, units no longer prompt for or auto upgrade to new abilities. Only affects human players. This problem disappeared after a few games and then returned.

18-I have played some games where my units both will not, and do not prompt me to promote units, no matter how many battles are fought or improvements are built. Looking at the units' displays, there are 0 upgrades listed, all game long. Every unit acts like a new unit in stregnth and promotion.
19-A continuation of 18, except that the AI players do upgrade their units even though human players cannot.

17- What I mean here is that units that should get hills bonuses are not getting them. After promotion even, they still loose to units more than they should if they are bonused. In some cases, the units die easier when on hills, etc.

15- After the patch install, some civs seem to have personalities randomized even though the setting to randomize personalities (options screen) is disabled. After playing a dozen games before the patch, you could predict the actions of the AI clearly as their personalities are set unless you allow randomization on the options screen.

Health bars are enabled, they don't show up when units attack anymore. They did before.

I knew Mansa Mursa did because I was playing with one other person and we both traded with him. We could see which technologies were available from him. We were in the middle ages and he showed to have all technologies on the trade screen when he previously did not and should not.

2- I don't know how else to put this one. For example, in the tech tree, it will say 145turns to archery. On the tech bar, it says 4 turns. On the city details screen it says 82 turns to pyramids, once selected, the city says 8 turns to pyramids.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[Zanmato]

Perhaps put another option in the poll:
Game only works after upgrading system and/or drivers.

As I believe some of these problems can be resolved after upgrading the RAM or video card. Some of the graphical issues might be resolved after updating drivers. Ok, it should work if your system meets the spec but most likely due to poor programming it doesn't and the fact that they grossly overestimated the min. spec is another issue.

Reason 45 is maybe due to having VM values set to different amounts. Windows allocates the VM where and when needed, fragmenting the HD. Perhaps if it is does on a partitioned HD that would be a different matter, please provide more feedback if that is the case. I have noticed no more fragmentation than usual after playing Civ4 and I do let Win2k control the VM only it set to a static amount.

Norton AV is a massive memory/system hog like Civ4, no wonder people report crashes with both running. Norton likes to control everything it possibly can.

Just my thoughts.

 

[MrCynical]

41- All units have the ability to assault amphibiously without limit.

Sorry, I was being dense here, I know what you mean now. All units are supposed to be able to attack from the sea, but unless they have the amphibious assault promotion they get a 50% penalty. This is how it should be working on all computers

15- After the patch install, some civs seem to have personalities randomized even though the setting to randomize personalities (options screen) is disabled. After playing a dozen games before the patch, you could predict the actions of the AI clearly as their personalities are set unless you allow randomization on the options screen.

Health bars are enabled, they don't show up when units attack anymore. They did before.

I knew Mansa Mursa did because I was playing with one other person and we both traded with him. We could see which technologies were available from him. We were in the middle ages and he showed to have all technologies on the trade screen when he previously did not and should not.

It'll only display the techs Mansa Musa has which you can trade for. It won't show any techs he has if you don't even have the prerequisite techs, so when you acquire the prerequisite it can seem like he suddenly gets several new techs. In practice he had them anyway, it just wasn't displaying them as you weren't allowed to trade them.

 

[SINBAD]

the game auto exit after a certian time of play...the CIV4 auto exit same place of the game.. after i end turn it will process and automaticaly exit... i have found the error and its in themeparselog.