I'm seeing some worrying problems with games failing to start.
Since I first installed patch J, I started 2 single player games with no trouble.
Playing a hotseat game the other day with my cousin, it started fine the first time, but we got poor starting positions, and decided to re-roll.
The second time, the game stalled indefinitely at Initializing.
And the third
and the fourth
and the fifth
and the sixth
and the seventh
and the eighth
Finally, we got it to work again, on the ninth try. Took us over an hour and a half just to start a game
Now I'm having the same issue trying to start a new single player game. tried twice so far, and it stalls permanantly at initializing. Had to terminate Civ via process manager.
Always use Huge worlds. 12-16 civs, depending. Generally used options are:
- Blessings of Amatheon
- No culture flipping
- Living world
- All unique features
- Broader Alignments
- Flavour Start
- New Random Seed on reload
- Permanant Alliances
Right now, I'm also trying to start a game with Last Days, in addition to the above. And it just doesn't want to work.
The mapscript that's used, varies. In the big run of failures trying to start a hotseat game, we went through Erebus, Highlands, Tectonics, and Continents. Eventually, Erebus was the one that worked. But it didn't work the first two times we tried it.
One thing that really, REALLY exasperates this problem, is that many of the settings in the Custom Game window aren't saved. Most notably, the number of Civs, and what you select for those civs to be. At the moment, I'm trying to start a 14 civ game with only Good and Evil civs, (no neutrals), and every time it fails, I have to reselect 14 options before I can try again. I'd really like to see those saved between attempts, at least. Not to mention several map options aren't saved properly, like the Peak Softening on the erebus mapscript.
When I say Stalled Indefinitely, obviously this isn't fully tested. I didn't have the time to leave the PC on for several centuries to see if it would finally load. But we gave each attempt an average of 5 minutes to load, before calling it a failure. From my experience, even the largest maps usually finish setting up in under a minute, if they're going to work.
I noticed in recent patch notes, that there have been a lot of changes to flavourmod. As far as I understand, that mainly governs setting up the map, and starting positions of civs. So perhaps it would be a good place to look for this kind of problems relating to starting games. Maybe there's an infinite loop condition in there or somesuch.
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PS: As a side note. I've noticed, worryingly, that Civilization has a habit of refusing to give up focus while it's in a loading screen. And Even the task manager, which is supposed to be Always on Top, doesn't show. Luckily, I'm experienced enough just to work with the keyboard, and the audio feedback. The following Key Combination works
- ctrl+alt+del (brings up process manager. I always have it set to that, because the task manager never does what it's told without considerable delay)
- C (selects civ4beyondsword.exe)
- tab (switches focus to buttons at bottom)
- E (presses End Process)
- Enter (answers yes to confirmation message)
But I'm really worried of what will happen if I ever have another program beginning with C running at the same time.
I have a gut instinct that this refusal to give up focus is hardcoded, but if it's at all possible, is it something you guys could change?
PPS: I've just noticed, I have a habit of seperating my posts into excessively small paragraphs. This is mainly due to there being less text space in the editing window, and paragraphs thusly look longer than they do on a full page.
