I may have to microwave my Civ 4 CD...

[MyNameIz]

Civ 4 has no support whatsoever.

(I thought I'd say that at the top of my message so the search engines would pick it up, because Firaxis obviously doesn't want you to call them with any issue. This seems to be the only way to send a smoke signal to them to pick up the ball.)

The game freezes (or causes my PC to reboot) during the game on just about every other turn. Using 16-bit colors, tiny maps, higher priority performance levels for the app (using Ctlr-Alt-Del), and other compromises to the quality of the game don't help.

I'm running an AMD 2500, XP/SP2, 1GB, ATI 9800 Radeon machine. I've patched the game twice.

My Civ 4 init log file says:

[137.007] DBG: CIV Init
[137.067] VERSION: App: C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Civilization4.exe
[137.067] VERSION: Build: Wed Dec 21 19:17:25 2005
[137.067] VERSION: 1.5.2.1736 (42422)
[137.437] VERSION: Mod Loaded: none
[139.069] DBG: FILE Cat Init
[148.062] DBG: NOT Using XML cache, failed to find crc.dat file
[148.112] DBG: Game Init
[148.122] DBG: Multiplayer Init BEGIN
[148.493] DBG: Multiplayer Init END
[148.523] DBG: Audio Init
[151.057] DBG: ArtFileMgr Init
[151.067] DBG: Python Init
[169.924] VERSION: CIV Version: 0
[169.924] VERSION: Save Version: 102
[169.934] DBG: Input Init
[169.934] DBG: Engine Init
[170.314] DBG: Checking available screen resolution
[170.635] DBG: Validating screen resolution
[170.635] DBG: Creating rendererer
[180.519] DBG: Engine: renderer Initialized
[181.100] DBG: Engine: Shaders Initialized
[181.140] DBG: Engine: Scene Lights Initialized
[181.531] DBG: Music Start
[181.551] DBG: Font Init
[181.661] DBG: Total Frame MS: 45507.0 FPS: 000 Min:000 Max:000 Avg:000 SampleFilter:10.000000
Time : Ave : Min% : Max% : Num : Profile Name
-----------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
[181.691] DBG: Begin MenuManager
[212.976] DBG: Engine: Camera Initialized
[226.776] DBG: SyncRandSeed is 185850, MapRandSeed is 185850

--

I haven't seen any answers to this issue yet on the forums, and it seems that FIRAXIS HAS NO SUPPORT WHATSOEVER.

Can anybody please suggest a solution?

Thanks!

 

[Pellanor]

Can anybody please suggest a solution?

Nope.

Or at least I can't, and I've been searching for one for about a week now. Maybe more.

I think that Civ IV doesn't like the Radeon 9800, as you're the second person I've noticed today with that card, and the same problem I'm having (except I tend to get 20 turns instead of 2 between crashes. At least in the medival era anyways).

 

[asmodai]

There's only so much we can suggest/troubleshoot, but if the problem lies with the company that wrote the code, there will not be much we can do.

Reminds me of the Leviathan issue in SW:KotOR.

 

[Lt mor]

Yes this thing is happened with my Radeon 9200 Pro also.
and after reinstall , re patch , download many new driver ...
Its still don't work.

So I dice-did to put the game back in its case , and understand that for now Sid meiers is on me all the way to is bank

Its has been a waste of time and money.

 

[Herocrafter]

I won't defend Firaxis as I've spent countless hours scouring the forums searching for ways to make the game run stable. But I also won't dump on Sid cause I've just got to many fond memories of games gone by penned by him that worked great from the get go and kept me gaming happily for months on end. So I have to believe that that Civ 4 isn't his doing. It can't be.

Anyway, my rig is amd 2200, ati 9800pro 128mb, 1g mem (pc3200 ddr 400)

In ati catalyst I now have anti aliasing 6x, anisotropic filtering 16x, AI advanced, mipmap detail level high quality, wait for vertical refresh always off, unless application specifies, smart shader effects none, api specific I only have enabled geometry instancing checked(I noticed that I got rid of those white eyes/eyebrows by unchecking Support dxt texture formats). Agp is at 8x and all the writes and reads are on.
And in CivilizationIV.ini I changed memsaver from 0 to 1.
In the game I have everything graphic set lowest. So far this works for the most part ok on the smaller map. The game still crashes if I load saved games often. The game still crashes for whatever reason but these settings seem to let me get the most of it. At least until the next patch comes out (and judging from the past it looks like they are 1 month apart, one long month) from Firaxis and hopefully one from ati too.

 

[asmodai]

I sincerely doubt Sid Meier programmed every single bit of Civ IV.

From what I see this is their first game to feature 3d graphics (I might be wrong here), which, combined with moving to XML and the likes, means that the bar of programming got laid way higher. Nonetheless, they could've stopped a lot of bugs before releasing by simple testing.

 

[iSkratch]

I sincerely doubt Sid Meier programmed every single bit of Civ IV.

From what I see this is their first game to feature 3d graphics (I might be wrong here), which, combined with moving to XML and the likes, means that the bar of programming got laid way higher. Nonetheless, they could've stopped a lot of bugs before releasing by simple testing.

Yeah but then they wouldn't have released it in time to steal all that christma$ ca$h.