GOTM3: Forfeit from me this month (Curse you Edison!)

[GenericKen]

Two very-well timed power-outages wiped out the majority of my progress in the GOTM, and I'm afraid the thing's just been too spoiled for me to play honestly.

*shakes fist at tyranical utility companies*

 

[DaviddesJ]

How does a power outage cause a problem? You can just open the most recent autosave. If you're playing the GOTM, you should generally set your autosave to save every turn, but even with the default setting of every 4 turns, it can't possibly cost you "the majority of your progress". You can just repeat what you did before, so it shouldn't be hard to "play honestly".

 

[lukasbradley]

Some of us with older systems and laptops benefit from not autosaving each turn. Honestly, I can't run my system effectively with autosave each turn. We turn most aspects off towards the end when things get intense.

This isn't exactly what Ken is going through, but I can understand his point. If you make 5 turns ahead, before the last autosave, then it crashes, it becomes hard to justify to yourself continue playing. "What exactly did I do the third turn?"

I had major problems with this on GOTM1, before 1.52.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Some of us with older systems and laptops benefit from not autosaving each turn. Honestly, I can't run my system effectively with autosave each turn.

Really?? I find this hard to believe. It seems to me that the AI turns must take much longer than autosaving does.

 

[Conroe]

Really?? I find this hard to believe. It seems to me that the AI turns must take much longer than autosaving does.

Back under version 1.0, my system would crash during about half of the autosaves and would crash everytime I did a quick save. I ended up turning autosave off. I'm sure Firaxis has probably fixed it by now, but I have never gone back into the ini file to turn autosave back on. I can't speak for the other two folks, but that is why I don't use it.

 

[lukasbradley]

My system has a performance increase with (amongst others) autosaves off and no screenshots. Might not make sense, but neither do most of the problems some of us have had.

 

[DaviddesJ]

My system has a performance increase with (amongst others) autosaves off and no screenshots.

OK, that's weird, but you could still save manually at the end of every turn.

 

[BCLG100]

OK, that's weird, but you could still save manually at the end of every turn.

Slightly time consuming really though.

 

[AlanH]

Slightly time consuming really though.

More so than getting near the end of the game and losing it all?

 

[lukasbradley]

OK, that's weird, but you could still save manually at the end of every turn.

I don't mean to continue to belabour the point, but you seem very concerned about this. I understand your and Alan's points entirely, but I think you're not respecting the problems some others may have had.

In the last, say 100 turns in the game, save files easily reach 300k a piece. In the middle, they are around 200k. If a player dillegently saves each turn, at 200k a pop, that's 20M of save files around.

My laptop is a 3Ghz, with 1G of memory, a 60G 7200 RPM drive, and a Radeon Mobility 9000. I don't have trouble with *any* other games. But with Civ4, this 20M of saving, along with all the other things we have to do to keep up with the Civ4 problems, it does become tiresome.

So yes, believe that some would get tired of the problems, tired of saving each turn, tired of the crashes, to the point that our desire to turn in a fair complete and game is overwhelmed by the gauntlet of problems to run through. So instead of sacrificing his integrity, Ken decided to throw in the towel this month, and share his frustration.

I'm not complaining, bragging, or attacking. As a matter of fact, I'm getting my ass handed to me this month, when I can normally defeat Monarch soundly. I wish I had an excuse to stop playing. My hat is off to Ken, I understand where you are at, I'm sorry you felt you couldn't keep playing.

Now I'm off to try to scrape out some sort of stand in my hellacious performance.

 

[DaviddesJ]

In the last, say 100 turns in the game, save files easily reach 300k a piece. In the middle, they are around 200k. If a player dillegently saves each turn, at 200k a pop, that's 20M of save files around.

No, he would only need to keep one save file---the most recent---to be able to recover from his power outage. He just needs to load the save from the previous turn.

(Not that I see why it makes any difference whether he has 20M of save files, or not. It's still a small fraction of the size of the installed game itself.)

 

[lukasbradley]

Congrats on your 1000th post. You used it well.

 

[ewokimpi]

Originally posted by lukasbradley

In the last, say 100 turns in the game, save files easily reach 300k a piece. In the middle, they are around 200k. If a player dillegently saves each turn, at 200k a pop, that's 20M of save files around.

In single player, quick save is done with Shift-F5. There is only one quick save file, so only 300k is ever taken up by saving with this method.

Back on v1_09, I used it every turn because of stability problems.

On v1_52, quick saving now puts up a stupid "you really want to overwrite the quick save file?" message. Makes me feel like clicking on the "Of course I want to, you dumb computer" button.

I can see how that message screen would be unfriendly to a computer with a weak video subsystem/graphics driver.

 

[DaviddesJ]

On v1_52, quick saving now puts up a stupid "you really want to overwrite the quick save file?" message. Makes me feel like clicking on the "Of course I want to, you dumb computer" button.

I believe that will be fixed in the next patch.

This is one reason I'm "belaboring" this issue: the more that we can understand what problems exist, the better the chance of getting them fixed.

 

[FriendlyFire]

My system has a performance increase with (amongst others) autosaves off and no screenshots. Might not make sense, but neither do most of the problems some of us have had.

Hmmm might give this a try.
Beats having the client crashing every 5mins very late in the game

 

[jayeffaar]

OK, that's weird, but you could still save manually at the end of every turn.

Besides being incredibly annoying to do, I don't see why that would help. If they're having trouble with the autosave, chances are the problem isn't with the "auto" but with the "save" . . .