Firaxis: Patch coming next week

[chris.giddins]

ng to impact whether it works for US. Comprende? The fact that Firaxis has ACKNOWLEDGED these problems counters the ill-considered puerile commentary from the "works fine" crowd.

Venger

Have they? what did they say.

 

[Philips beard]

I only know one major bug, and this one should really be dealt with; when you do peace negotiations with the AI, you can fool him to make any deal you like, including giving you all his cities. Just demand it for peace, he tells you you're crazy demanding that, you ask him what could make this deal work, a pop up comes up, telling you this can't be done, you click the pop up off, and suddenly the AI is suggesting the same crazy deal you suggested in the first hand. You accept it, and the crazy deal is done......

 

[oldStatesman]

There seems to be a bug in the way civ 4 manages memory address spaces. See this thread.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137706

Harkonnen, who has done a great job hunting this down ( ) , summarizes in Posts #122 & #123.

Good news is it should be able to be fixed with a patch...

Harkonnen also recommends setting the swap file to 2GB minimum in his posts, as this will help minimize (not solve) the issue until a patch comes out.

 

[Larry Conrad]

after hours of frustration and anger, i finially got this working, sorta. had to uninstall my ATI drivers, which is a pain, and installed Omega 4.12 drivers. now i can finally at least play. After a while I start getting graphical artifacts showing up in movies, diplomacy, and map. I have the occasional game freeze, seems to happen when things get modern. So i have to save a lot, and when things start to go wierd, I quite and restart. seems to help some.

frustrating beyond belief. im enjoying it, but its bitter sweet. everytime i boot it up, i think "is it going to work this time?". I expect it to fail at some point. i expect it not to work. pretty dumb.

the music is awsome though.

I say amen to the above post. I have read all 480 posts on this matter and I would like to add this. I never played Civ I or Civ II. I started playing Civ III after my two adult sons talked me into it. I cannot tell you just how much I enjoyed Civ III. But, as much as I have enjoyed Civ III I have already enjoyed Civ IV more, when it comes to actual game play.

I read this in a GamesFirst review.
"The bottom line is that if you are a Civ fan or a turn-based strategy fan, you should be out buying this game instead of sitting here reading this. Civilization IV is definitely the most streamlined, best looking, as well as the most strategic Civ to date. If you are brand new to the series, then this is a great place to start. My only caution is that Civ is a game with a lot of concepts to learn and the learning curve is pretty long. But once you go through the in-game tutorial and try your hand at a few games by yourself, you will be very glad you did. Just make sure you stop playing every week or so to let friends and loved ones know you are still alive."

Having read that I say, this game would drive any new player away for life simply because of the bugs, and glitches. For, they would not have had the addiction to Civ III which would drive them to continue to play such a poorly developed game. Player one cannot trade with other players and they cannot trade with him. We noticed this glitch the moment we made contact with each other. On a large map the most turns we could go through, with the three of us and three automated civs, was 20. As the game has progressed, we are now in year 1350AD, we now go through 5 turns before the game crashes to desktop. If this pattern continues we will be lucky to get one turn in before crashing. We save after every turn so we can pick up were we left off. There are numerous other bugs and glitches but all of you have listed them enough that if the makers of the game are reading the forums, hopefully, they will make a patch that fixes the really big problems. To those of you who claim to have experienced no problems; I envy you. Truthfully, if I knew then (when I purchased the game) what I know now. I would never had bought this piece of junk. I would have just continued to play Civ III.

To those who claim this game was play tested, I say bull. After only one evening, about four hours of play, the three of us discovered several problems. And, I am not talking about small type telling you enemy troops are near Athens. I am talking about game crashing problems, that should have been noticed by the most casual of game run throughs.

 

[Dark Helmet]

Civilization 4 is a crime against God, and has forced me to abandon religion, as any God I believed in would never have allowed such an abomination to be birthed.

Congratulations Firaxis. You killed God.


..so, any news on the patch?

 

[DaLagga]

Well said larry. I couldn't agree more as i feel the exact same way.

 

[Mercade]

Having read that I say, this game would drive any new player away for life simply because of the bugs, and glitches. For, they would not have had the addiction to Civ III which would drive them to continue to play such a poorly developed game.

Very true. Welcome to CivFanatics, though, Larry.

It is the wrong order of things, but hopefully the next few patches will improve things to a level of being playable for many who are now having problems. I'm affraid it won't change the conceptual flaws of trying to render too much.

Just imagine: Civ3 graphics with Civ4 gameplay.

M.

 

[denyd]

$49.95 for Civ IV
$225.00 for a new 256MB G-Force Sound Card
$80.00 for an additional 256MB of RAM
$90.00 to pay PC Club to recover my system from the STOP: Inaccessable_boot_device error caused when Civ IV locked up and my hard re-boot trashed the OS

Priceless: Lesson learned to never again buy the first release of any software until the patch is out

I'll just re-install PTW & Coquests and wait 6 months or so before I consider putting Civ IV back on my system. For Civ V expect me to be first in line when the price drops to $19.95.

 

[blue3c]

Civilization 4 is a crime against God, and has forced me to abandon religion, as any God I believed in would never have allowed such an abomination to be birthed.

Congratulations Firaxis. You killed God.


..so, any news on the patch?

Can we frame this post and put it on a wall. I laughed so hard reading this that coffee was almost all over my desk. That would make one hell of a sig.

 

[upstart]

$225.00 for a new 256MB G-Force Sound Card

what exactly is g-force sound card? if you mean a geforce video card, good buy, ive owned several, never let me down. didnt quite spend that much, tho.

$80.00 for an additional 256MB of RAM

you got jipped, i can get a gig for about that price, high quality stuff too

$90.00 to pay PC Club to recover my system from the STOP: Inaccessable_boot_device error caused when Civ IV locked up and my hard re-boot trashed the OS

also jipped, and btw...hardware failures destroy software, not the other way around. this stop error was probably unavoidable due to failing hardware(if its old, it breaks, thats pretty much a given w/ computers) or else an OS that hasnt been reinstalled in awhile(thank microsoft or spam providers-also a given with internet)

 

[denyd]

Yes that should have been GE-Force and I do like the card.

The memory was direct from Dell. I'm not that PC savy, so I went to the OEM for the memory.

The PC Club expense is only a quote at this point. The crash came as I was trying to load an earlier saved game and the system locked up. I tried a soft boot and the system froze again during shut-down process and force a power off re-boot. I'm hoping that a OS (Win 2000) will solve the problem. The 40GB HD is only 3 years old.

To tell the truth I really like the game with all the enhanced graphics and new concepts and techs, but I just got a little frustrated with 5 minute interturns (std map, 1300 AD), the virtual memory hiccups and the lack of being able run with full animation on anything above small maps.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

How long till the patch comes out, I have gone back to playing DK2 for a while till it does, am sick of the CTD and other problems. What on earth happened to quality control at fraxis? Would not have happened back in the Microprose days.

 

[Civrules]

I guess they'll release the patch when it's done.
I rather them work on it and not rush the patch so it fixes the issues they know, otherwise we'll see more complaining.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Well, hopefully the patch will be a whole lot less bugridden then the release version. Could have been so good at release, had they not thought with the bottom line of their bank statements.

 

[Psyringe]

What on earth happened to quality control at fraxis? Would not have happened back in the Microprose days.

Actually, back in the Microprose days they published a patch for Civ2 which *completely* broke the AI. It just sat there drooling while the player took over the world. Microsoft QA apparently didn't notice that. Don't let nostalgia fool you, the "good old days" had their slew of problems too.

Civ games always had to go through several patch iterations before they got the game right. I expected nothing different now, actually I'm surprised that the game has far less gameplay bugs at release as I expected. The important thing is that they *always* kept supporting the game for a long time, fixing and improving the game a lot. That's what we'll see with Civ4 also. (It would be suicide for any company not to give their flagship the best support they can).

 

[Pokurcz]

How well I remember CIV II....it played so fast that it gave the impression of being an extension of your own mind. I remember playing it on a laptop placed on my belly whilst lying in bed with my right arm straight gripping the mouse on its pad beside me. It seemed to be the only way it could ever be. How I cherish those moments of utter comfort and blissful trustworthyness of the program gone with the past.

Why can't I trust the programers of today, are the games that more complicated or has the rush for money reached such a velocity that the costumers faith has become irellevant?

Behold what awfull sentimental gibberish splutters through my mind.
See what you have done to me,
Ye minions of darkness!
For shame!

 

[CalvinHobbes]

I still have civ2 on my machine, is still great, I recommend finding it and installing it, and cos it is designed as a windowed program, it still works, magic.

 

[Pokurcz]

In deed!

I must dig it out of its exile in some drawer long forgotten!

 

[Big Ev]

I've just been a total sucker and playing through crashes.

Game hard locks my rig, I reboot. And reboot again, and again. Right now I'm at 1900AD in my "first full fledge game."

Why am I such a b*tch? My computer should tear through this game.

When can we get an offical acknowledgement from Firaxis/2K that patch is due. I take all this rumor with a grain of salt.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

That would be far too good customer service, hey, the released such a bugg(ed)/(ered) game onto the market to catch the christmas sales as far as I can see.

"Customers?, who cares what they think as long as they buy our game........" said Mr 2K Marketing Manager