Optimizing RAND

[Stevenpfo]

Has anyone had any luck changing up the setting and/or turning off certain parts of the mod to stop the CTDs? I love this mod. However, it is getting really frustrating with the crashes.

I've lowered my map size to standard and I am playing with 16 civs. I'm sure that that is contributing to the crashes (size/# of civs). I don't want to lower either anymore. I usually play on even large maps with more civs. Lag isn't really an issue. In my current game i'm about to get rifleman on Snail speed and it takes about 3 seconds between turns but I crash about every 10 turns.

I really don't want to quit that game because a very large world war is about to start but the crashes and the redoing turns where I move 50+ units a turn is getting frustrating.

Would turning of revolutions help, you think? Has anyone had luck mixing up the components to get a more stable playing experience?

Edit:

I'm playing the latest beta build.

Here are my game settings:

Using a custom ROM_Full_of_Resources_300 map. Which is badly bugged when trying to lower tundra/ice and such. Marsh and arctic don't show up but tundra takes up 80% of map. If I turn them right off (arctic/tundra) then I get all grass everywhere. worked out though with a smaller map and lots of civs. I also tried an updated version of FoR and had the same results.

Standard sized map
Continents
Conquest only
Ancient start
Snail speed

No city flipping from culture
No Tech Brokering
Limited Religions
Start as Minor Civ
Multi Production
Multi Research
Surround and destroy
Adv Diplomacy
Barb Generals
Assimilation
Great Commanders
Culturally linked start
Realistic culture spread
Larger cities
Religion decay
Expanded Castles
Arctic and city parks
Meteorology
Early bldgs
Civic bldgs
Historical wonders
Guilds
Modern corps
Adv Nukes

Trying out some of these new options as i've just come back to Civ4.

 

[SanderJK]

By far the most common course of crashes are Memory Allocation Faults (MAFs) on 32 bit operating systems. Basicly, those are capped in terms of how much memory a single program can use, and Civ IV scales badly, crosses that line, and CTDs. You can tell your PC to ignore it, via this trick.
I have a pretty bad videocard, an early quadcore processor (which is pretty bad for Civ IV, since it only uses 1 core) and 4gb of RAM on Vista 32bit and since using the above tricks MAFs are a thing of the past for me. The game sometimes still crashes on the videocard driver lategame, and if I play for a long time, the game takes ages to shut down properly, but otherwise, I just finished a game on Huge/Continents in Superhuman eras, 12 starting civs and due to revolutions 10-20 AI's in the game at any point.
Turn times aren't much related. They mostly become long because the AI considers a lot of stuff that it really shouldn't (Like assessing every city on it's continent for possible attack every turn with every unit). At least that's what Koshling says.

 

[Stevenpfo]

Thanks a lot! I'm going to go and give this a try. I'll give it a go on that game I stopped playing due to crashes.

 

[Stevenpfo]

Works like a charm. No crashes after a few hundred turns. Thanks again, SanderJK.

 

[Nimek]

I have question about performance

I have a Win 7 64bit Intel quad 4 GB RAM and 1GB Graphic RAM DDR5.
I play RAND 1.76 beta 5 - in later game turn time is about 30 seconds.
My question: If i buy another 4 Giga RAM turn time will be noticeably shorter or not?

 

[Stormwind]

Probably only a few secs if you have many programs running in the background, but since memory is currently very cheap it won't hurt in the long run

 

[Koshling]

By far the most common course of crashes are Memory Allocation Faults (MAFs) on 32 bit operating systems. Basicly, those are capped in terms of how much memory a single program can use, and Civ IV scales badly, crosses that line, and CTDs. You can tell your PC to ignore it, via this trick.
I have a pretty bad videocard, an early quadcore processor (which is pretty bad for Civ IV, since it only uses 1 core) and 4gb of RAM on Vista 32bit and since using the above tricks MAFs are a thing of the past for me. The game sometimes still crashes on the videocard driver lategame, and if I play for a long time, the game takes ages to shut down properly, but otherwise, I just finished a game on Huge/Continents in Superhuman eras, 12 starting civs and due to revolutions 10-20 AI's in the game at any point.
Turn times aren't much related. They mostly become long because the AI considers a lot of stuff that it really shouldn't (Like assessing every city on it's continent for possible attack every turn with every unit). At least that's what Koshling says.

The BTS EXE is already flagged as large address aware, so this should make no difference on BTS. Warlords wasn't. Since someone reported that it DID help I double checked and verified that the vanilla BTS EXE was flagged as I thought (it was), so I can't comment on why that person's experience improved, but it can't really have been this.

 

[SanderJK]

The second part of that allows Vista 32bit to use 3gb instead of 2gb for a single program, I believe.

 

[dudeSDCA]

I have question about performance

I have a Win 7 64bit Intel quad 4 GB RAM and 1GB Graphic RAM DDR5.
I play RAND 1.76 beta 5 - in later game turn time is about 30 seconds.
My question: If i buy another 4 Giga RAM turn time will be noticeably shorter or not?

try running the game in high priority (see the below thread, just use Civ4BeyondtheSword instead of Civ4)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-190976.html

I also downloaded Bill's Process Manager and created a rule to keep Civ4 running on high priority. Definitely makes a difference.

 

[First]

You can do the same with the Windows Task Manager. I found out that AND was being run at below average and after I changed it to High, the times between turns on my Gigantic make was reduced dramatically.

 

[Nimek]

Ok i have now 8GB RAM and 1GB Graphic RAM but in the late game after load a save i can play only
1-2 turn cause after that game crashes. So i must save after each turn and load after crash play 1-2 turn - save - crash - load. Why??? What is missing in my hardware to avoid that. It is very annoying. Windows 7 64bit with New dawn 1.75C. Ca You help?

 

[os79]

Play with 1.76 beta.
Break the curent game unfortunately but you get to play even further in a game. Still will get MAFs but more later.

It's no one fault except for Firaxis stupid policy of refusing to adapt the base game to 64-bit OS.

 

[First]

Unfortunately my previous post only lasted for a couple turns. Turns last about 2-3 minutes and I get random CTD's, and guaranteed CTDs when I try to zoom out. Most likely has to do with the sheer size of the map (Gigantic).

 

[Stormwind]

@First, which OS ? Are you playing windowed or fullscreen ? First step may be to lower the graphics to lowest and enable all reducing graphic related options except for "unit animation" which is needed for the non-vanilla units to be displayed properly.

 

[First]

Windows 7 64bit, fullscreen. I'll give the lower graphics settings a shot.

 

[Nimek]

I play AND 1.76beta5 save game with maximum compatiblity. Is there any way to turn off revoluions during the game. (change something in save source code or anything).