Minimum requirements and still it crashes

[graham_k]

"The Minimum System Requirements for the game are: 1 GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, and a 32MB video card with hardware transform and lighting capabilities. The recommended Specifications are: 512MB of ram, Pentium4 processor, and a recent graphics card (like the Radeon 9800)."

Device manager reports a 3.00gHz Pentium 4 (although I thought that it was 1.1 gHZ !) on my Toshiba Satllite Pro P25 laptop. I have 1gB of RAM and have my swap file set as fixed size 1gB on its own partition.

I do tend to have a few programs running in background, but generally have 600-700mB RAM free when I start - and just coming to Industrial area on my first game (with a huge map), the program continually crashes.

I am guessing that it is a RAM problem ...

I don't want to have to boot into safe mode just to play. Any hints? E.g, can I turn off the Wonder Movies? Btw, I do have the latest patch (1.52, 22 dec 05).

 

[MrCynical]

Civ 4 runs badly on huge maps even on some machines with the recommended specs. Make sure you've turned graphics down to low, and possibly try enabling low res textures.

You can turn off the wonder movies by opening up the Civ4.ini config file and changing "nomovies" from 0 to 1. These are generally what seem to cause the late game crashes so hoipefully it should fix the problem.

Harkannon produced an unofficial patch which reduces the memory usage of Civ 4. You can find it in the creation and customization forums/utility programs section.

 

[Zydor]

Its a long shot - but try increasing the pagefile to 2000mb min=max, huge maps are memory eaters, its possible you are running out of space in the pagefile. You definitely need to stop running other programs at the same time as a huge map game, the latter may not be the root cause of the problem, but it will help the earlier symptoms you mentioned

 

[graham_k]

Well, huge map is what best fits my style of play - if given the choice; if I have to live with smaller, then I will just have to learn new strategies.

The "nomovies" tip is the sort of thing which I was looking for. I already set graphics to low-res. Any other graphic tweaks?

It does appear to be a graphics problem. When I first posted, Civ4 was just bombing oout & dissappearing. Since then I saw one error message about grphics memory, bad allocation.

I also made page file min/max = 4gB, but that didn't help, so I need all the grpahics tips I can get (I will search the forum again).

Thanks for your help!

 

[graham_k]

Good news, I made some progress. It is no longer crashing - although I am only at year 1020 a.d

I guess that either a smaller map or running it in a window, rather than full screen, did the trick.

If I can finish this game I will try huge map & I will report back.

Please post any other tips, in case anyone else reads thsi thread.