Another Reason Not To Buy Warlords

[Charles 22]

If you spent more time fixing your problems, than ranting about it, we'd all be happier.

How nice to see so many pointless complaints about people complaining (and so I have just added to it! ). Maybe I would be happier if you spent some effort helping me instead of being so pointless. See? I've already got one of the problems allegedly fixed, now if you have a point, and your fellow complain-about-complainers brigade should take your own advise, you might actually think about doing something substantive to help me. A few have suggested drivers and such, and though I don't think it wise advise at this time, at least they tried. Frankly there is no solution to the video problem yet, as I suspected, and I did later peruse the tech section and I went through all the hoops on the vanilla patch till somebody fianlly came up with something just before the patch. It's called inability to do much useful to the computer to solve a sizeable programming problem on my part, so work on my part is virtually useless, I know, for, as I say, I had been through all that before with the previous patch. A video driver fixed my initial black map very early on vanilla but only programming the patch could fix this titanic problem that a certain percentage of us get. I suppose if they ever fix this again, and I for some reason buy the next xp, the same problem will crop up again.

Now maybe you and the other whiners have a clearer idea why there is precisely nothing I can do at this point, and apparently neither can the rest of you, or else you would tell me now. I see no solution in the tech forum, so just what is it that I'm going to do to fix it? The only splinter of hope was some defrag program for memory, but then common sense reminds me how we didn't need that for the prior patch to work either for the same problem and apparently some have tried it with no success. I will try it, but I'm not expecting success. It sounds like something that works for somebody that don't maintain their computers at all, but I will have a go at it sometime or other, but for now I have to get into a game deep enough to see if it will make a difference.

 

[Charles 22]

What's the problem with his ranting?

By the very title of this thread, it is clear that you won't see any praising. So, if you feel harmed by somebody not satisfied with Civ4/WL, just don't enter such a thread.
Alternatively, just point out where the OP could improve his settings or find solutions for what he thinks is not optimal.

Thank you for your support.

 

[Forsaken]

I have completed a 13 civ game on marthon without any of these problems
Guess i'm just a lucky one

 

[azzaman333]

My main problem is the thread title. The majority of people would have Warlords working well, or would know the limitations of their computer. There is always the small group of people who feel they must stop everyone else from buying a game with a couple of bugs (which is to be expected). It took at least 1 patch to get Vanilla in decent working shape, but some bugs still arent ironed out in the 3rd patch (1.61). Warlords has few bugs on release, even if you compare it to patches 1 and 2.

EDIT: and i play Civ 4 on a 1 and a 1/2 year old laptop, and it runs fine until the late game when the map is revealed, when it just lags a lot more.

(My laptop is below reccommended specs)

 

[lost_civantares]

Warlords made the game faster for me, though if it wasn't for the fact that Warlords was a gift, I wouldn't have (and really still don't) see the worth in shelling out $30 for it.

 

[Ljdjr]

Good try, but I'm all up to specs (1MB memory for example).

Well there's your problem.

If your hard drive is near full you might try uninstall both/defrag/reinstall.
Just a guess.

 

[solidarity]

How nice to see so many pointless complaints about people complaining (and so I have just added to it! ). Maybe I would be happier if you spent some effort helping me instead of being so pointless.

You come to a forum dedicated to the expansion of this game telling people not to buy it because it makes the game freeze out during the later period of it, kindof saying it sucks. And you expect everyone to be courteous and nice in response? If you want help, ask for it, don't ***** at people for no reason.

The only bug I've had with Warlords is that on some occasion bombardment sounds flip out and I go deaf (headphones). In response I turned off sound effects cause well, I'm usually talking to people and listening to music, so it's mostly a bother to begin with.. I'm sure it could be irritating though.
I play max amount of players on varying map sizes, standard to huge, without noticing any graphic bugs or having slowdown issues of any kind.. and no one i know has any issues with it either.

 

[Commander Bello]

You come to a forum dedicated to the expansion of this game telling people not to buy it because it makes the game freeze out during the later period of it, kindof saying it sucks. And you expect everyone to be courteous and nice in response? If you want help, ask for it, don't ***** at people for no reason.
[...]

Well, you seem to love the diversity of opinions, don't you?

The OP didn't ***** (whatever this means) at people for no reason. Seems to me that certain people felt confronted for no reason.
If he doesn't like the game at all, or doesn't like some components or aspects of it, and therefore thinks the game is not worth buying, why would this mean he **** at you?

Obviously, you feel ***** as soon as somebody doesn't share your opinion. Ever thought about this?

 

[solidarity]

Well, you seem to love the diversity of opinions, don't you?

He isn't giving an opinion. :S He's telling people that his computer isn't able to handle the game for whatever reason (it's impossible to guarantee functionality with all possible system configurations off the bat.. trust me), and the game for that reason isn't worth buying.. Disregarding that from what I can tell, the absolute majority isn't having any notable issues with the expansion. (If I'm wrong please do tell me, I just haven't seen anyone with the same issues)
This still doesn't matter to me, while it is a pointless complaint, I'm fine with complaints. If he wanted it to be a more valid complaint, he'd just mention the part about that the expansion is mostly only scenarios.. Which it is, and I guess if you're not into them, you won't appreciate it.

The OP didn't ***** (whatever this means) at people for no reason. Seems to me that certain people felt confronted for no reason.

***** was a bit much, sure. Suffice to say, he started a thread doing nothing but complain (I didn't say I had anything against that.. People can complain all they want), then got mad at people who didn't post constructively and trying to help him in response. That's what gets me, if you don't post in a friendly manner, you shouldn't be expecting a friendly response. He can complain back at the peole all he wants, but saying that they should be helping him just doesn't fit the initial post which isn't asking for help.. Just telling people not to buy the game.

If he doesn't like the game at all, or doesn't like some components or aspects of it, and therefore thinks the game is not worth buying, why would this mean he **** at you?

I wasn't complaining at the original post (okay, to some degree sure), but rather at the text i quoted:

Maybe I would be happier if you spent some effort helping me instead of being so pointless.

That, along with other parts of his posts, is **** at someone, if he'd spent some effort making a post asking for help instead of complaining, he'd have a bigger chance at getting someone making an effort to help him. You can't expect everyone to be at your becking call, and you can't expect anyone to help you when you aren't asking for it.

Obviously, you feel ***** as soon as somebody doesn't share your opinion. Ever thought about this?

I don't know if you're understanding my post. It isn't about his opinion. The second paragraph of my post is simply stating my experience thus far with the expansion. His experience isn't the same and I couldn't really care less. (I don't get that riled up over someone's opinion over a video game) What I don't appreciate is pointless attacks to someone complaining back at your complaint post. People don't have to steer clear of a post because it might contain something they don't agree with.

(I also don't know what ***** is anymore.. it's meaning seems to have been diluted)

 

[Agrajag]

Same problem for me (3.2GHz machine, 800fsb, 1GB RAM, X800XL 256k video). Warlords, especially at the end game, is dramatically slower than Civ4 native was. My first two Warlords games were so slow that I didn't bother to finish them.

 

[Charles 22]

I have completed a 13 civ game on marthon without any of these problems
Guess i'm just a lucky one

Oh yes, it seems the majority don't have this problem, but then I doubt most play huge marathons with 12 civs very much, unlike me.

 

[Charles 22]

My main problem is the thread title. The majority of people would have Warlords working well, or would know the limitations of their computer. There is always the small group of people who feel they must stop everyone else from buying a game with a couple of bugs (which is to be expected). It took at least 1 patch to get Vanilla in decent working shape, but some bugs still arent ironed out in the 3rd patch (1.61). Warlords has few bugs on release, even if you compare it to patches 1 and 2.

EDIT: and i play Civ 4 on a 1 and a 1/2 year old laptop, and it runs fine until the late game when the map is revealed, when it just lags a lot more.

(My laptop is below reccommended specs)

I agree with you somewhat, problem is the same stupid problem that was solved on the vanilla patch rears it's ugly head again. I wrote basically an attack thread because I was angry firstly that the price didn't equate to the minimal impact on the game, and then to make matters worse, later, to find I paid $30 to have an xp that is worse than vanilla. Had I a little more patience when I wrote the thread and hadn't been playing off the value of the xp so much I would have realized they will likely fix it in a patch like before, but it is pretty angering to have played vanilla just a few weeks back and this video problem wasn't occurring. You would think that an xp of the same game wouldn't see the same problem cropping up again. I needn't even get into all the denials and fights that resulted from people telling us with the machines that were considerably "beyond" specs that the problem was ours and how we didn't maintain our computers allegedly and other nonsense like that.

 

[Charles 22]

Well there's your problem.

If your hard drive is near full you might try uninstall both/defrag/reinstall.
Just a guess.

Yeahhhh, my HD is all of 27% filled. I'm not sure I did a defrag before installation of either vanilla or warlords, but then I do so frequently enough that it don't matter anyway. I would be more apt to try a new driver than to do that, btu then I don't think new drivers are the answer, as they weren't for vanilla either.

 

[Charles 22]

You come to a forum dedicated to the expansion of this game telling people not to buy it because it makes the game freeze out during the later period of it, kindof saying it sucks. And you expect everyone to be courteous and nice in response? If you want help, ask for it, don't ***** at people for no reason.

The only bug I've had with Warlords is that on some occasion bombardment sounds flip out and I go deaf (headphones). In response I turned off sound effects cause well, I'm usually talking to people and listening to music, so it's mostly a bother to begin with.. I'm sure it could be irritating though.
I play max amount of players on varying map sizes, standard to huge, without noticing any graphic bugs or having slowdown issues of any kind.. and no one i know has any issues with it either.

I don't expect courtesy so much, but to get onto a thread to be pointless I'm not so warmed to, and actually I didn't want any help to start, but it kind of evolved into that because after decribing the problems some started to respond as if I had (just natural I suppose).

Now in responding to me you have ironically ran into your audio fix, though as I've adjusted mine I'm not entirely sure it works yet, but since I did edit something I do fell pretty confident that did it. See here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=179475 (go to post #8)

So you now know how things developed in this thread as they did and you also can see my approach to it has changed somewhat. I'm actually kind of embarassed that I titled the thread that way, but even if I can edit it, it will stand, if for no other reason than I'm still frustrated that they can let the same stupid problem go onto the next patch again.

 

[PennHead]

Sorry to hear you've been having problems with Warlords.

Thought that might be it too, however, it works just fine in vanilla, and besdies, drivers didn't do me any good in vanilla. It actually took a patch to solve this problem before, the driver made little or no difference. Whether an audio driver will fix the sound I haven't a clue, but as some people are cavalier to suggest driver updates everytime you get a problem, I know better than that, as the newer drivers are often worse. I suspect the warlords doesn't have the 1.61 patch from vanilla on it, but if so, I guess the only way it can work is for them to make one for warlords.

I do strongly recommend you rethink your position on driver updates.

The fact that vanilla works with your current drivers is no guarantee that Warlords should too. I have no way of knowing for sure, but it is entirely possible that there were things changed in the engine that require newer drivers. Such changes are commonly made in expansions.

Also, the fact that a similar problem in the past was only resolved with a patch does not necessarily mean this one requires the same. As a programmer, I have seen plenty of times when a similar looking problem had an entirely different cause. Of course it is also quite possible that you will need a patch. However, it is wise to try everything you can do on your end, and that means new drivers.

I find it interesting that you say new drivers are often worse. While there are sometimes new releases of drivers that have problems, that usually isn't the case. It makes me wonder if perhaps you aren't properly uninstalling old drivers when installing new ones. I'd recommend using a program such as Driver Cleaner Pro(google it, it's free) to make sure old video drivers are removed. Driver upgrades shouldn't be making problems worse, and if they are, chances are something is going wrong in the upating process.

The fact that there are many people playing Warlords while you have problems indicates there's some kind of problem between Warlords and something about your machine. However, that's not nearly the same thing as saying it's your fault, and others on the thread would do well to remember that. It is entirely possible that there is a programming flaw in the game and that you will need a patch like you did before. However, in the meantime while waiting, I'd wholeheartedly recommend trying updating drivers anyway. Even if it doesn't fix this problem, your computer should run better as a result.

 

[Charles 22]

Sorry to hear you've been having problems with Warlords.

I do strongly recommend you rethink your position on driver updates.

The fact that vanilla works with your current drivers is no guarantee that Warlords should too. I have no way of knowing for sure, but it is entirely possible that there were things changed in the engine that require newer drivers. Such changes are commonly made in expansions.

Also, the fact that a similar problem in the past was only resolved with a patch does not necessarily mean this one requires the same. As a programmer, I have seen plenty of times when a similar looking problem had an entirely different cause. Of course it is also quite possible that you will need a patch. However, it is wise to try everything you can do on your end, and that means new drivers.

I find it interesting that you say new drivers are often worse. While there are sometimes new releases of drivers that have problems, that usually isn't the case. It makes me wonder if perhaps you aren't properly uninstalling old drivers when installing new ones. I'd recommend using a program such as Driver Cleaner Pro(google it, it's free) to make sure old video drivers are removed. Driver upgrades shouldn't be making problems worse, and if they are, chances are something is going wrong in the upating process.

The fact that there are many people playing Warlords while you have problems indicates there's some kind of problem between Warlords and something about your machine. However, that's not nearly the same thing as saying it's your fault, and others on the thread would do well to remember that. It is entirely possible that there is a programming flaw in the game and that you will need a patch like you did before. However, in the meantime while waiting, I'd wholeheartedly recommend trying updating drivers anyway. Even if it doesn't fix this problem, your computer should run better as a result.

Thanks Pennhead, but until I run into trouble again I'm going to maintain this position at least. I have done something in the form of the memory defrag program which I'm not sure did anything at all, but at least this way i will know if it worked or not before I go piling other solutions on top of it (though I'll always try a patch). I hesitate to install new drivers for other reasons too. Not the least of which is what a new driver will do to all my other programs, as I know people go back through old drivers sometimes to get somethign to work, since i know enerything but warlords works I don't want to find myself in a worse position in other places on only a hunch that a driver might solve the one problem I have with this one.

About uninstalling drivers, though, I've done it only once and I don't see how it possibly could have not done it and the display updated and everything. In fact, when I uninstalled that time, I only did so because the layering of one over the other, as I used to do it for what few updates I had to do, didn't work that time, so I sailed into uncharted waters, and it worked. The driver uninstalled and the new driver obviously fixed what it was supposed to. If I'm not mistaken this was the driver that cleared up the map coming out as solid black on vanilla. Any other drivers I tried for this game didn't make any noticeable difference, but only the patches and that one time somebody had a temp solution before the patch, that I guess in effect was a patch. It certainly wasn't a driver change in other words.

I'll keep all this in mind anyway.

 

[Unless]

I think people are willing to help more if you posted this in the tech support forum instead of the main discussion of the game.

Anyways, what kind of graphics card do you have? (make and model, please)

 

[Charles 22]

I think people are willing to help more if you posted this in the tech support forum instead of the main discussion of the game.

Anyways, what kind of graphics card do you have? (make and model, please)

I can't precisely recall, here at work, but it's something like an Nvidia FX 5600. All that information is correct, I'm just not sure at the moment of the specific sub-name it may have. And don't tell me there's a new driver for it, I've already been through that (though I haven't tried it). The game works perfectly up to what I specified before. I don't know what they did to fix it on vanilla, but I'm under the impression it has a lot more to do with memory than about graphics, or rather, a lot more to do with how the game is managing the apt memory I have for it (well above specs). The forums exploded last time with this problem when vanilla had it and though I don't regularly visit the tech forum I hadn't seen anything about this until I did, so that was part of my purpose in mentioning this as I did, so that people might want to try the sort of settings I did, if indeed they thought they would ever play a game that way, to see if theirs was screwed up too.

 

[Older than Dirt]

I have played two marathon Terra Map games with 12 civs and have also noticed some lag in the graphics in the end game. I bought a new computer in November with more than the needed specs after giving due consideration to the sage advice in the fora. I tried the old vanilla civ4 trick of pressing the shift key while the game is initially loaded. This seems to have helped somewhat. However, I did get a couple of CDTs to desktop doing so. Perhaps once the loading preceeds past the "load XML" phase the key should not be pressed as after doing this, the game loaded properly.

It would be helpful if those who reply to such a problem as the OP stated, would specify whether or not they have ever played on such a large map and with as many civs, because such may be speaking from inexperience.

By the way, I hate with a passion the ugly mountains in Civ 4. You may proceed to attack my whining now.

 

[Charles 22]

I have played two marathon Terra Map games with 12 civs and have also noticed some lag in the graphics in the end game. I bought a new computer in November with more than the needed specs after giving due consideration to the sage advice in the fora. I tried the old vanilla civ4 trick of pressing the shift key while the game is initially loaded. This seems to have helped somewhat. However, I did get a couple of CDTs to desktop doing so. Perhaps once the loading preceeds past the "load XML" phase the key should not be pressed as after doing this, the game loaded properly.

It would be helpful if those who reply to such a problem as the OP stated, would specify whether or not they have ever played on such a large map and with as many civs, because such may be speaking from inexperience.

By the way, I hate with a passion the ugly mountains in Civ 4. You may proceed to attack my whining now.

Ah, good to see some more purpose-driven whining as opposed to the other sort of whining displayed in more than one case.

On the subject of disabling the cache, which is what your hitting the shift key was supposed to do, I do that ALL the time, and when I don't you can see the difference almost immediately in the game, so it's not that. I don't think I've ever had a CTD at that point. I always get them deep into the game the overwhelming majority of the time (only once in warlords, but then I haven't been 12 civ huge marathoning it deep into the game more than once either [I'm always using pangea]), and even then there's distinct signs that things aren't going as they should, but of course that's not talking anything before the mid game point anyway. I also have the shift key depressed even through the introductory screen, as it used to seem it disabled the theme movie and such as well, but in warlords it doesn't disable the movie anymore, which makes me wonder how it was disabled before. It wouldn't surprise me too much to see that they not only didn't put the latest patch into fixing the end game problems like in vanilla, but also didn't keep the movie disabling on the shift key. Something tells me the shift key didn't really disable the movie too, as I recall other games having files edited for that, but then again IIRC when I didn't press the shift key for an extended period it would play.