Patch went to 2k for testing

was posted on the official CIV IV site today:

A Note from Firaxis Concerning the Civilization IV Patch
November 16, 2005

Hello everyone!
I've heard from many of you via the Firaxis website Contact Us form (many thanks for all the dxdiag files and savegames) and wanted to say thanks for all the feedback and detailed bug reports that were sent up.

I just wanted to let everyone know that as of Monday afternoon, the patch was sent to 2K for final testing, so barring any problems in QA, we will be releasing it shortly.

Some of the highlights include multiple AI improvements and tweaks, worker behavior tweaks, MANY game play improvements (ex Animal Husbandry reveals horses), promotion tweaks, a softer pillage sound (requested by many, many people), fixed diplomatic exploits (gold for gold, peace treaty exploit), multiplayer tweaks (Hot seat, Lobby, etc.), memory, caching and performance improvements, etc. There were also a number of video card specific fixes.

To those of you having problems, thanks for your patience. Our guys were working around the clock with your detailed feedback to produce this patch. For those of you having no problems, it's only going to get better. =)

Dennis Shirk
Firaxis Games

 

Good sighting, and from a new member! Weclome, and an excellent way to make an entrance!

http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/firaxis_note_01.htm

 

"memory, cacheing and performance improvements"

Does this mean there is a memory leak?

 

Could be, but also could mean better utilizatiom of memory. They also mentioned vide card fixes, which I think is the main one for most of us.

 

Good timing I have all of next week off of work

 

See, if I were Firaxis, I would have released the game next week, since apparently that's when it will be done.

But I guess that's why I'm not Firaxis. I have stupid ideas like that.

 

What, and miss the millions of dollars of sales? Are you crazy? They shoul dhave just packaged it more appropiately:

"Sid Meiers presents Civ 4 matching set of decorative beverage coasters."

I can never decide if my drinks look better on the "Play" disc or on the other one.

 

If they would have waited, some people wouldn't have had problems, but nobody would have been playing it yet either. I would rather have a release that isn't quite perfect than have to wait. Even though I get a BSOD or CTD every hour or so, it is better than not even playing.

 

For the love of everything Holy and Righteous, HURRY UP WITH THAT PATCH!!!

 

It's a lot worse than not quite perfect. I'm so tired of the constant sugarcouting going on in this forum. You make it sound like there's a minor bug that's little more than a nuisance. There are several major bugs in this game. They'd have saved us thousands of hours collectively of slamming our foreheads against our monitors trying to get this thing to work if they'd have waited until they got it done right.

 

When you buy software right out of the gate you're rolling the dice. If you don't like that idea, wait until it's been out a while and the kinks have been worked out.

 

You're kidding, right?

 

He's right... It's not just games either. Doing that would have saved a lot of Windows ME users a lot of headaches. I won't make a list of others.

 

The same goes for the patch. If they can release the game in a beta condition why can't we have the beta version of the patch? The worst that could happen would be that I have to revert to v100, in which case I would be no worse off than I am now.

 

give up that patch!! I am about to use this cd rom as a beer coaster.

 

Oh thank god, this means we should have a patch by next week.. Hopefully it wont get delayed becuase of Thanksgiving

*crosses fingers*

 

But most importantly, for me at least, are they going to fix the issue with tooltips sometimes not displaying. This is a real problem as it means that you lack easy access to info about tech advances and unit/structure abilities.

 

Seems like you have REAL problems!!!
That can't actually be your main goal for the patch! Loads of people have problems PLAYING the game and all you want to see in a potential patch is a fix for TOOLTIPS NOT BEEING DISPLAYED???

Come off it! I have to try hard to stop laughing now

 

I have been playing civ since it came out in the early 90's. Every time a new version or expansion pack came out I,ve bought it. If Firaxis had put out a note that due to further testing the release could be put back 3-4 weeks, the majority of players could have waited in order to play a game relatively free of bugs. I have read this forum for quite some time (first time poster though) and find it hard to believe that the producers and developers would not have known about some of the issues. Like I said, a short delay would have saved players a lot of headaches and firaxis its good reputation. Anyway, that's my two cents.

 

I know full well that others are suffering much worse problems. However I am sure that there are many people out there that agree with me that this is a pretty serious gameplay problem. Its not so bad for those (like me) who have now played this game quite a bit, but for newcomers this would make the game much harder to get into than it should be.