[Col] Colonization suddenly freezes up

[kklungre]

I've got a laptop running on Windows XP, and I can start and play the game with no problems except that quite often the game freezes after my turn has ended and the little square in the bottom right corner that shows different colours suddenly only shows one colour.

This quite annoying, and if I try to load an autosave the same thing happens at the exact same time.

Thoughts anyone?

 

[Sisonpyh]

Funny thing is, I get this exact same problem with freecol

 

[ZippyRiver]

don't rely on the auto save function. I have this happen on occasion, but I don't use auto save (I save every turn at the begining anyway).

 

[Gangor]

I get the same problem. The easiest solution is to go away and get a cup of coffee or something - it just starts working again by itself eventually. You'll know it's back because the music starts again.

 

[Lord Shadow]

I just had the same problem, and it won't go away. The game invariably freezes in the natives' turn (little green box on the lower right corner), when they attack an English town from a village of their own in the adjacent square.

 

[Tboy]

Same problem here, even when fully patched. I even try some different moves and actions to avoid it, but to no avail.

 

[Tristan_C]

the game has some weird rules governing its random seed, which seems to change frequently, that you might be able to take advantage. reload an earlier save and try to get a different sequence of random events (different combat results, different lost rumors, and such) and if you end up with a different random seed, the ai is likely to behave differently on the buggy turn, or the combat be different, in which case there won't be a freeze-up.

 

[MastahMan]

Hey, just registered here to say i had the same problem, it was a real pain in the ass. i booted the game via viceroy.exe, i tried booting via the batch file called colonize that comes in the game and never had this problem again. played like 2 days in a row without a freeze... it's been a while but well whatever.

 

[happyday9]

I had the same problem...all i did is disable the autosave and it worked great.

 

[deedl]

When my colonization freezes, i can't move any units but still save my game, and after saving it works again.

 

[Lord Shadow]

So did anyone ever manage to fix this lock-up issue on version 3.0? Back when I last played, I had to use a previous version, 2.25, to evade the freezes. Disabling the autosave feature didn't help. The game just freezes completely, I have to forcibly close DOSBox.

I've attached my savegame, in case anyone wants to experiment with it. Remember it's for v3.0. It freezes when processing the natives turn upon ending yours.

 

[dalgo]

I tried that save game but did not run into your problem.

When the game started a caravel was active. I fortified that and the turn ended. There was one Indian move followed by a message 'The price of Furs in London has risen to 4' and the game continued as normal.

Edit: There is a way to determine if it is that message causing the freeze. Use a cheat code to give yourself extra gold then buy a caravel in Europe and fill it with furs. The message about the price increase will be displayed immediately.

 

[Lord Shadow]

Strange... Considering the possibility that there was something wrong with my game, I re-applied the 3.0 patch and it doesn't freeze at that spot anymore.

Now, I don't know whether the game corrupted a file on its own, or I somehow patched it incorrectly back when I updated it.