Sickest bugs you've experienced in Civ 1?

[Rickard77]

Its not very common, but sometimes the game start to get buggy after playing a while.

Once I played i got real suprised when suddenly the other civs discovered between 1-3 knowledges at every turn! And when I spoke with another civ they sort of offered to share 6-7 knowledges!

Any other similiar bugs you've experienced with Civ 1?

 

[loopinaloop]

I've experienced exactly this same bug. Other three that I remember are:
1) pollution appearing on the ocean square East of the Australian shore
2) either I've captured enemy city or he did mine but either way, I had one of my military units still inside the city despite it belonged to the AI.
3) North of Canada appeared strange-looking terrain that when worked yielded incredible amounts of resources. Something like 100 food + 100 shields + 100 trade. It was impossible to tell exact numbers because it was a bug and you had icons of resources spilled all over your city screen.

The last one was the most mind-blowing bug ever. My games never crashed after those.

EDIT: oh, and the autosave bug when you can play after destroying all other civs, completely alone.

 

[Whelkman]

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

 

[nickthehun]

I have verson 474.04 and have hardly experienced bugs. But in my latest game I've conquered all but a few enemy capital cities which I've improved with my settlers and now use as trade routes. I've got my research going strong (2 discoveries per turn), peace is +100 and my spaceship has been waiting for launch. But as soon as I launch the spaceship, I start getting widescale pollution every turn, even though my pollution is at 0 (demographics). Is this common?

And there's the bug where I will have a captured city with a unit within (home city), that I suddenly can't control. I can't click on it and enter the city screen. If I move one of my units into it, I capture my own city as if it was an enemy city. Then in the city screen, it shows that the vanishing unit is being supported by the city but it won't appear. If I have a second unit within, it doesn't disappear. Not a gamebreaking bug, just peculiar...

 

[loopinaloop]

I have verson 474.04

I thought that there are either vanilla or patched (v05 available on Apolyton) games. Can you explain me what's this all about?

 

[Vanadis]

I had a bug with one of my older versions of the game, on a floppy (I have over 15 years). After some playing time, any party confused when I clicked to change the construction of a city, my game freezed, forcing me to reinstall. I never knew where it came because the files in the folder were correct.
I guess the version wasn't realy official

 

[AnorakTel]

I've experienced exactly this same bug. Other three that I remember are:
1) pollution appearing on the ocean square East of the Australian shore
2) either I've captured enemy city or he did mine but either way, I had one of my military units still inside the city despite it belonged to the AI.
3) North of Canada appeared strange-looking terrain that when worked yielded incredible amounts of resources. Something like 100 food + 100 shields + 100 trade. It was impossible to tell exact numbers because it was a bug and you had icons of resources spilled all over your city screen.

The last one was the most mind-blowing bug ever. My games never crashed after those.

EDIT: oh, and the autosave bug when you can play after destroying all other civs, completely alone.

Your bug 3 is what my friends called the Atlantis bug. You are playing heavily and suddenly a new square shaped continent appears in the north. If you land a unit on it then the program crashes. If you have a city nearby then the new land is so wondrously productive that working it gives you the worst pollution ever.

It happened to the original version. It seems that the map is held using 4 bits per tile. This gives you 16 different terrain types but only 14 are used. Presumably the program references a table giving production, food etc. If you have terrain type 15 then the reference misses the table and you just get some numbers that are hanging around in the code.

The reason for the bug is there are too many units and the unit table overflows onto the map. Atlantis is actually part of the data table holding the units.

I worked out a powerful cheat with this. Using a hex editor on a SVE file I put a bit of grassland in the ocean and a bit of terrain 15 nearby. Then back in the game I founded a city on this island. Well the bit of terrain 15 within city limits gave a huge bonus and all the pollution (a grey band - there were so many smokestacks) landed on the ocean. This city gave me a new advance each turn, more gold than I could use and built a new wonder in one move every time. I got bored with beating up people with my armada of battleships and sent off a spaceship just to end the game. I think I was on Future Tech 200 when it arrived. Sometimes cheats are just too powerful.

 

[Dack]

This gives you 16 different terrain types but only 14 are used.

I'm a little confused.
Is this CIV DOS you are writing about?
Are you writing from memory or have you done this recently?
In CIV DOS, I count 12 terrain types: arctic, desert, forest, grassland, hills, jungle, mountains, ocean, plains, river, swamp, and tundra.
EDIT: a little while later
There is a city that some of it control squares are of a non-standard civ dos value (5). It appears that only settlers can venture on to these squares. Play a few rounds of this game and see what you think.

 

[AnorakTel]

I'm a little confused.
Is this CIV DOS you are writing about?
Are you writing from memory or have you done this recently?
In CIV DOS, I count 12 terrain types: arctic, desert, forest, grassland, hills, jungle, mountains, ocean, plains, river, swamp, and tundra.
EDIT: a little while later
There is a city that some of it control squares are of a non-standard civ dos value (5). It appears that only settlers can venture on to these squares. Play a few rounds of this game and see what you think.

Yes, yes and no I haven't.

This was a very early version of DOS CIV - the one where transports caused war weariness. We hacked the save files. I think bonus grassland is a different terrain to normal - so perhaps there are only 13 terrain types. The important thing is there are some spare ones that aren't valid.

Having hacked an Emperor game and got a Space ship to Alpha Centuri many years BC ... Well let's say that the cheat was too powerful to be worth repeating.

In the early days we thought CIV was shareware and started playing on what must have been a pirated copy. Then we went out and each bought a legal copy. The naughty copy was very early and was superseded by the legal copy. The legal copy was the next version - transports didn't cause war weariness and shift 1234567 didn't switch into cheat mode. Most importantly even if you hit the unit limit, Atlantis didn't suddenly appear.

Anyway I haven't hacked a CIV I save file for nearly 20 years and I probably have all the details wrong. It's still a good game though and I'm looking forward to trying out some the new things I'm learning here.

 

[AnorakTel]

I've had a look at the save game.

London is on a non-standard tile as are several adjacent grassland tiles.

That looks very much like the cheat/bug

 

[loopinaloop]

Wow, thank you for your informative post, AnorakTel. Civ1 was my favourite game and the "Atlantis bug" was one of the strangest things that could happen to you. It's great to get some insight after so many years. It's great to be here, just to learn something new after so many years!

 

[noushina]

Curious about the "Atlantis Bug." Could someone direct me to more discussion of it and how to get it to appear? I have version 1 of Civ1.

 

[AnorakTel]

It seems to happen when you create too many units. We first found it when trying for the highest CIV rating. (We installed CIV on machines at work and there sometimes were several engineers playing in the evening after work. It could get quite competative.)

The aim was to have just one enemy city left, the entire world filled with We Love the President cities and 40,000 colonists reaching Alpha Centuri. And all this as early as possible. (Unfortunately if you are about to get a huge score the game normally crashed as you got to Alphacent. But that's another bug.)

Well one of the ways to do this is create a huge army and go on a blitzkreig. After a bit there are messages about you've reached the maximum number of units. Well we ignored that. In later versions it disbands a unit to make way for the new one. In the very early version it keeps on creating new units. Then Atlantis appears.

 

[Valen]

I'm intrigued by this Atlantis bug, but I've never seen it.
Can this happen on random worlds or is it just on Earth?
Does it happen at all difficulty levels?

 

[Al Capone]

The only buggy experience I ever had with CivI occurred about ~15 years ago (I had just joined school, if I remember it right). I had a random map with big landmasses, a wet moderate climate and old mountains on the warlord difficulty. My settler started by the ocean and I founded my first city. I was playing a blue civ, the Germans I suppose.

I then wanted to produce my first militia to protect my city from barbs and enemies. I hit the next turn button a dozen times probably. When I took a look at the city's interface I realized that my militia had made no progress at all.
I then pressed next a few more times - successlessly.
I saved the game and reloaded it.
Suddenly I had most technologies of the game, however not all. At least I could build tanks, that I remember. In ~1000BC.
Piteously my enemies had already founded several cities and were even further advanced so that I couldn't really use the bug for my advantage. Nevertheless, the game was fun.

 

[Theov]

The only buggy experience I ever had with CivI occurred about ~15 years ago (I had just joined school, if I remember it right). I had a random map with big landmasses, a wet moderate climate and old mountains on the warlord difficulty. My settler started by the ocean and I founded my first city. I was playing a blue civ, the Germans I suppose.

I then wanted to produce my first militia to protect my city from barbs and enemies. I hit the next turn button a dozen times probably. When I took a look at the city's interface I realized that my militia had made no progress at all.
I then pressed next a few more times - successlessly.
I saved the game and reloaded it.
Suddenly I had most technologies of the game, however not all. At least I could build tanks, that I remember. In ~1000BC.
Piteously my enemies had already founded several cities and were even further advanced so that I couldn't really use the bug for my advantage. Nevertheless, the game was fun.

ssounds like fun!

 

[Morgan Black]

Definitely trying to get save games to save under DosBox.... errrr. Took me ages b4 I figured out to mount Civ folder as drive C:...

 

[JS38]

A bug I experienced today while playing as the Americans on a custom earth, Prince difficulty. The barbarians raided an AI city that had built the great library, and for some reason I think everyone was rewarded with the two free techs, or at the very least I was. For some reason techs I already had were on the list, but techs super far forward on the tech tree were also available. I ended up picking up Nuclear Fission, which gave me access to build all of the buildings from the techs previous to that one. This allowed me to effectively skip most of the tech tree, it's made every building and wonder prior to the most forward tech I picked available it seems.

This was on the DOS version, I'm not sure what version or build of the game I'm playing, but it's through DOSBox.

 

[tuga2112]

The barbarians raided an AI city that had built the great library, and for some reason I think everyone was rewarded with the two free techs

im pretty sure in the dos version i play great library gives me free techs of 2 other civs. when they unlock them. it can be a lot more than 2 techs in total or zero depending on technologically advanced you are in comparison to the AI

I ended up picking up Nuclear Fission, which gave me access to build all of the buildings from the techs previous to that one.

I Have stole techs in the past from AI similar to that but never got access to "gapped techs" buildings.

what dificulty were you playing ? and which year did this happen ? im curious to try and reproduce the scenario

 

[JS38]

im pretty sure in the dos version i play great library gives me free techs of 2 other civs. when they unlock them. it can be a lot more than 2 techs in total or zero depending on technologically advanced you are in comparison to the AI



I Have stole techs in the past from AI similar to that but never got access to "gapped techs" buildings.

what dificulty were you playing ? and which year did this happen ? im curious to try and reproduce the scenario

Pretty sure it was on Prince, and my theory on what happened was the barbarians captured the city with the great library and somehow gifted it's benefits to all players.

Here's my copy of the game, which has my auto saves. In the 1750AD save I'm researching Monarchy while I have techs like Automobile. I didn't check the earlier saves.

EDIT: I read the rules, can't post my copy of the game. If you would like to contact me, my Discord is John Cochran#2108