Cannot Load or Save games

[Balaak]

Game plays fine for the first 30 mins or so. Around the time I advance to the Medieval? Age I start having problems.

I will be unable to save any games, or load any that I have saved from either the general Save game folder in Civ3 directory or the Auto-Saves.

I get - "LOAD ERROR - NOT A VALID SAVE FILE" followed by the path of the save game directory. Same message for attempting to save a game "SAVE ERROR - blah blah valid blah".

If I continue playing the game - within a turn or two the game crashes to a pop-up that says "Fatal Error - cannot draw blah blah".

Been doing the acrobatics all day of updating all drivers for windows XP and GeForce 4 card, deleted the saved file and updated 1.29, uninstalled/reinstalled, performed a wiggly voodoo ceremoney over the screen. No luck so far. Only difference in my system over the last year of perfect Civ3 gameplay is the new GeForce vid card.

Any suggestions?

 

[Chieftess]

Can you attach the save file? Is this for any game?

 

[Redwyne]

I am having a similar problem. I am unable to save games after playing once. From the second game forward when I try, it appears to save, but there's no file created (I tried it twice by uninstalling/reinstalling). The auto save does work, however.

Any suggestions?

I have Civ 3, PTW, and the latest patches for both.

 

[Squeek]

OK, I just tried installing it under Windows 98 SE, and it works fine (I have a duel-boot setup). It was some sort of problem with Civ 3 running on Windows XP, at least on my system.

 

[Balaak]

As I had mentioned I wasn't having this problem previous to a few weeks ago.

During that time I had installed a new GeForce card and downloaded a slew of Windows updates. Logically the problem is there somewhere.

A few weeks ago I also ran through a System Restore to reset some of my start-up settings. The restore reset at a point before the Windows Updates.

Well, that may have been the problem. I revisited the Windows Update and found certain Critical Updates were unable to download - failure errors.

This suggested to me something about the Updates that was conflicting with my System Restore.

I found the solution to my problem to be another System Restore to a date prior to all my latest Windows Updates, then another attempt at Windows Updates. All were successful. I patched Civ3 and the game has since played perfectly.

Still, I was unable to access any of the saved games from before the Restore. Games after the restore have worked flawlessly.

I believe there were some issues in the Windows Updates that conflicted with other recent Updates (I had a message to that effect regarding video and game crashes from the Microsoft Update page) and caused some conflict in running certain games. I suggest anyone have the problem I described to use System Restore to a date before any recent Windows Updates and then to re-install all current Windows Updates from Microsoft.

 

[maclauk]

This sounds like a problem my dad has. When we originally bought the machine it kept crashing unless we turned off the video acceleration. Everything was OK until a couple of years ago we installed Civ III and the game ran incredibly slowly. Nonetheless my dad became a big fan of the game.

This Christmas I reinstalled Win98 to try and cure the problems. Video crashing issue was still there so I installed an old Cirrus Logic PCI video card that seemed to work fine.

I then installed Civ III and now have two problems :

1) When drawing the Civilisation tower during the startup sequence the screen redraws as it fades in and pans take 5 secs per screen. This means it takes over an hour to load the game

2) You cannot correctly load and save games.

However when running the game itself runs properly

Please help......