hello timberwoolf & kwsapphire,
I encountered a quite identical problem a few days ago - maybe this helps.
I had a hardware-crash loosing both, my graphic-card as well as my motherboard due to a failure in my cooling-system. Therefore I decided to stock up my hardware a bit - I didn't have any problems running civ4 whatsoever with my previous pc (
- Athlon 1700,
- Radeon 9600,
- 1GB RAM,
- sound on board) -
now I tried to run civ4 on my new machine (
- Intel Core 2 Duo E 6400
- Sapphire Radeon X1900 XT (256MB)
- 2GB DDR RAM 667
- Gigabyte motherboard
- Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy SE )
and the game started crashing on random intervalls between the 1st and the 50th turn. (above mentioned system should be outdistancing any minimum requirements by far!)
I started searching the internet for information... I updated the drivers of my graphic-card, my motherboard and my soundcard but to no avail. After these my game somehow seemed to crash even more often...
...next I tried to find something on civ4-forums (here & at apolyton). There where hints about changing ini-entries. This helped a littlebit (setmaxframerate in the civilistation.ini from 0 to 30). But this resulted in a crash between 5 and 70 or 80 turns which wasn't really satisfying... therefore I continued my search... I switched different settings in my ini, tried to log the error (civilisation.ini - LoggingEnabled = 1) but couldn't find anything helpfull in the logs either...
...most of the solutions provided on the net had to do with installing an old ATI-driver-set - which I couldn't do, since it was so old (version 4.12) that it didn't support my card yet. I even found an alternate provider (besides ATI) for ATI-graphic-cards (omega-drivers) but this didn't help me with my game-crashes.
the games crashes came randomly - sometimes when I hit "ALT+S" to save my game - it freezed. Sometimes when a diplomacy-screen pops-up it freezed. Sometime when I tried to give one of my unit a GO-command, during placing the target hex it crashed to desktop.
finally I found a forum-entry that said, that the user disabled the sound in his civilisation.ini and could play without sound without crashes. Having spent several days allready trying to fix the problem I gave it a try and voila! (civilisation.ini => AudioEnable = 0). The game seemed to have some problems with my soundcard (even though there seemed to be no connection between the actions leading to the crashes and any sound - some of the actions even didn't have a sound assossiated with them - I think).
Next I tested civ in a no-sound-game for 200-something rounds without any crash at all... and then I went on looking for a way to re-enable sound and prevent it from crashing. I finally found a setting in the game-options where you can select (in the audio-section) if you want to have Stereo, Mono, 5.1, 7.1, surround etc - one possibility was the "adopt windows settings". I tried that one - promptly got a game-error-message telling me that the voice-emulator was not working using these settings. Well, since I do not play over the internet and have no need to voice-chat with anybody during the game this worked for me quite fine...
I did all of this with version 1.52 - not with the newest one, yet.
therefore here comes my solution in short-terms.
1. discern if the reason for the crashes may be your sound-system by setting in civilisation.ini the entry AudioEnable = 0. Test the games - if it works now, the problem you are having is with your soundcard, not the rest of your system.
2. If the problem is your soundcard, try above mentioned solution: Re-enable sound in the Ini-File, start the game, go in to options/audio and select the option to adopt "Windows-Settings".
3. One thing, which I would do anyway is setting the maxframerate in above mentioned Ini-File to 30 or 40. IMO there is no reason whatsoever for Civ to try to display frames inGame faster than my eye is able to discern - above all, this is a round-based strategy game and no first person shooter!
well hope I could help you a bit - let us know if any of these hints worked...
Azal
.
((
