Initial black screen (unexplored map) crash error

[Kriku]

Dear All

I am having trouble with my Civilization IV 1.6.1.1841 (45604). I have had the same trouble with earlier versions of civ4.

When starting a new game, a black screen will be displayed with a ring and Warrior inside it. The game crashes immediately after that. I guess that unexplored map is displayed and the game crashes as it tries to glide to the first discovered patch of land containing initial units.

Sometimes the game goes well until "Play the Game" button is clicked on the initial dialog which shows the animated picture of the ruler of my Civ. Clicking the button results immediate crash.

By 'crash' I mean that the whole computer freezes. Disk activity continues for some time, then the mouse cursor disappears and that's it.

Sometimes restart and loading of my 4000 BC autosave helps, sometimes not. In rare cases, I am even able to play the game without restart.

In an earlier thread of this forum, it was said that such trouble occurs with Radeon 9200 with 32 MB memory. I have a laptop with 1,7 GHz Intel Centrino CPU, 512 MB memory and Mobility Radeon 9200 with 64 MB memory. It should meet all technical requirements specified in the homepage of civ4.

Thanks in advance for any help. Please find dxdiag attached. View attachment DxDiag.txt

 

[ori]

Welcome to Civfanatics
there are a few ways of getting to the core of the matter, but first things first:

Install the 1.74 patch, then
Install the newest DirectX 9c from Microsoft
if this does not solve the problem:
get the newest driver for your graphics card (MOBILITY RADEON 9200) - most likely from the website of the vendor where you got the laptop from.

If that does not help reduce the graphics settings and enable the memory savings in your civilizartionIV.ini (I can post how to do that, but am in a hurry right now).
512 MB RAM are barely enough memory to run this game, but it should not crash on you like this.