1stcontact2035
Great Scientist
Lately I was messing around with things trying to figure out why both Civ 4, SimCity 4, and some other games on occasion just crash to desktop - no malware, maybe my system runs slightly subpar for a giant map running a supermod on BtS, but it should be able to handle SimCity 4 and definitely some of the other games that have CTD. Ultimately I decided, recently, to look up the log files for the crashes. These led me, along with googling things, to the conclusion that one of a few things was causing this. After some trial and error, data execution prevention was left as the culprit.
So, here's how to solve that issue. You'll have to control panel, system and security tab, system tab, advanced system settings under the left options (should be the last one listed), go to advanced, go to data execution prevention, and then where it says "turn on data execution prevention for all services except the ones I choose", click the button for that and then browse the programs you want to exclude, click apply or ok, and you probably will have to restart the computer for effects to take shape (for safety sake, just exclude games and don't exclude it if it connects to the web - also my best guess is this problem is unique to games that were developed without much knowledge of this Windows feature, so games that came out after 2007 or so I wouldn't bother with this either - even though both Windows and the program seem to know when this is the case and the program won't let you exclude it many times in that case (take Steam downloaded games for instance)).
This should solve CTD bugs, in fact it will cause Civ 4 to use memory more efficiently for games that would otherwise have killed your system. Where other people have stated that the game slows down later, and you state that it just crashes every other turn, now it will just slow down like everyone else. In fact it should speed up somewhat for smaller, lighter maps and games. After all, this game is supposed to run on a minimum of 256 kb of memory - I've ran it on less than that, but that was on Windows XP without data execution prevention, and without crashing, in fact the game would just freeze if anything (versus CTD in Vista and Win 7 running on something akin to 20 x as much ram, quad core w/ 2 x processing speed per core, and 16 x the video memory, plus 64 bit). Shakes my head in bewilderment. OK, I only did small, maybe standard sized maps sometimes, on the other system, but still... you get my point.
So, here's how to solve that issue. You'll have to control panel, system and security tab, system tab, advanced system settings under the left options (should be the last one listed), go to advanced, go to data execution prevention, and then where it says "turn on data execution prevention for all services except the ones I choose", click the button for that and then browse the programs you want to exclude, click apply or ok, and you probably will have to restart the computer for effects to take shape (for safety sake, just exclude games and don't exclude it if it connects to the web - also my best guess is this problem is unique to games that were developed without much knowledge of this Windows feature, so games that came out after 2007 or so I wouldn't bother with this either - even though both Windows and the program seem to know when this is the case and the program won't let you exclude it many times in that case (take Steam downloaded games for instance)).
This should solve CTD bugs, in fact it will cause Civ 4 to use memory more efficiently for games that would otherwise have killed your system. Where other people have stated that the game slows down later, and you state that it just crashes every other turn, now it will just slow down like everyone else. In fact it should speed up somewhat for smaller, lighter maps and games. After all, this game is supposed to run on a minimum of 256 kb of memory - I've ran it on less than that, but that was on Windows XP without data execution prevention, and without crashing, in fact the game would just freeze if anything (versus CTD in Vista and Win 7 running on something akin to 20 x as much ram, quad core w/ 2 x processing speed per core, and 16 x the video memory, plus 64 bit). Shakes my head in bewilderment. OK, I only did small, maybe standard sized maps sometimes, on the other system, but still... you get my point.
