Crashes Out of the Box

[Perplexed009]

Hello Civ Fanatics,

I am looking for some help with a crash issue. I am playing Civ 4 out-of-the-box (no downloads, updates or add-ons), and the game is freezing and then crashing when one of my cities completes a wonder. Specifically, this has happened with the Hanging Gardens and the Great Lighthouse. I did successfully complete one wonder without a crash, that being the Pyramids.

I am running Windows XP (SP3). 1.60 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 video card.

I would be happy to provide more info. if helpful. Other than the wonder crashes, I have not been experiencing any other issues on game play. Thanks in advance for any suggestions on what the problem or solution might be.

Perplexed

 

[s.bernbaum]

Have you patched your game to the current version? (1.74 for the basic game, 3.19 for Beyond The Sword, 2.something for Warlords) There were bugs in the original releases that were fixed in the patches. Maybe this is one of them? Which version of CIV are you playing? (basic game - aka "vanilla"; Warlords; Beyond the Sword - aka "BTS")

If you have not patched the game, you can download the patches from the "Patch & Update" page of the forums, accessed by the drop down Civ4 menu at the top of this page. Don't use the in-game patcher nor the Firaxis page from the Patch links page. They connect to no longer existing pages. Use one of the mirror sites from the Patch links page.

 

[Perplexed009]

Thanks for the suggestion, Mr. B. In answer to your question, I am playing the "plain vanilla" version of the game - the CDs are out of the box, and I haven't (as yet) downloaded any patches or updates for the game.

Looking over my post, I thought it might be helpful to describe what I mean by "crashes" in the wonders. Once one of my cities achieves the wonder, the video/audio clip for that wonder will start to run. That's when the program freezes, and then crashes. My screen resolution is affected by the crash, and I have to re-boot to get it back. I would like to avoid this problem with the game in the future. Has anyone else had experience with this problem?

 

[s.bernbaum]

CIV is a memory hog and handles the memory it is using poorly. A frequent cause of crashes is Memory Allocation Failure or "MAF" (as it is known on the forums). This happens more often with larger maps and less often with more memory and a wider bus stream. With 4 GB memory and 64 bit cpu and bus, it rarely happens. With only 512 Meg, CIV is pushing its lower memory usage limits. It most likely happens when you achieve the wonder because the video is using memory and overwrites some part of the game code, causing the crash. (That is what a MAF is.) You can maximize your probability of successful play of CIV, if you are willing to cut down on the sound effects and eye candy. Go to the options screen and set all of the graphics settings to their lowest setting and turn off all the fancier graphics settings. On the sound options, set most of them to off as well. This will minimize memory use as much as possible and make crashes less likely and frequent. BTW, the longer a gaming session, the more memory problems accumulate and the more likely a crash becomes.

In the CIV folder in your Documents folder, you will find a file called CivilizationIV.ini. If you have display suffixes off, it will show as only CivilizationIV. This is a text file. Open it in your favorite text editor. Look through it for these lines:

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 10

(The second line may say "5" instead of "10". I have changed mine and don't recall the original.)

Change the "10" (or whatever it is) to "1". This will cause the game to auto save every turn. That way when you do get a crash, you can reload the game at the beginning of the turn where it crashed, from the Autosaves folder. Even with all the fancy stuff turned off, with only 512 Meg of memory, you will probably still get a MAF crash now and then. This change allows you to pick up about where you left off due to the crash.

 

[Perplexed009]

All good suggestions in the above post - thanks. Tried them all, but unfortunately the game still crashes when the wonder loads, or tries to. I think you put your finger on the nub of the problem, Mr. B., which is that even 512 MB RAM is not really adequate to run the game. I'm surprised that Firaxis claims the game can run on 256 MB RAM - I would hate to see what that must be like. Looks like I won't be playing Civ IV after all, at least not on my current machine.

 

[Quintillus]

Having played Civ4 Vanilla 1.00 a fair amount in 2005 and early 2006, I can say that wonder movies shouldn't, in theory, cause crashes. Nevertheless, since there may be a crash specific to your system that didn't affect what I had in 2005, installing patch 1.74 is a good idea that might help.

The other thing I'd try (and that might be more likely to help) is updating your video card drivers. Old video card drivers can cause problems with Civ4, and yours might be very old given the card's age. Unfortunately it looks like your graphics card is old enough that the drivers aren't easy to find on NVIDIA's website. You might find them by going to Windows Update at http://www.update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/v6/default.aspx?ln=en-us using Internet Explorer (it must be Internet Explorer for it to work), and looking at the "Hardware, Optional" category on the left side. See the picture below:



By default, you probably are already getting the High Priority updates, but the video card drivers are considered optional, so they won't install by default like the High Priority ones usually do. If there's an update there (it'll probably say "NVIDIA Graphics Drivers" or something like that), install it, restart if need be, and try again. May well solve the issue.

As for memory, 512 MB is rather lacking for Civ4 in practice. I had 512 MB when I first played Civ4. It's OK for Standard or smaller size maps. If you want to play Larger or larger maps, you really want at least 1 GB with XP (maybe 1.5 GB for Huge), and 2 GB with later versions of Windows. Despite that, 512 MB should be enough to run wonder movies and play the game on small maps, as long as there aren't too many background programs chewing up memory.

One other possibility is that something went wrong during the install. That could be why the Pyramids worked but others didn't.

 

[Perplexed009]

Q, thanks for the suggestion. The video card is running with an old version of the driver, since I recently had to do a clean re-install on XP. I will try and update the driver and see if that makes a difference on game play.

 

[Perplexed009]

Wonder of Wonders -- updating the driver for the video card made a difference. I can complete wonders now without a crash, and game play is smoother. Thanks Quintillus and Mr. B for taking the time to make your suggestions, it made a difference! Appreciate it...

 

[Quintillus]

Glad it worked! Have fun!