Railroads seem to be causing my huge marathon games to crash

[TractorBoy]

My pc is at the top end of all the specs required to play civV, having said that my pc still crashes about 1/3 of the way through a huge marathon game.
I was allways under the assumption that it was caused by the hundreds of workers, but now I think it is something to do with the invention of Railroads!

1 - Turn 480 game crashed.

2 - I tried to reload from turn 479, 478, and kept trying until turn 473 when the game reloaded.

3 - On turn 473 I noticed that I was one turn away from inventing railroads, and allthough the game was playable most of the farms built by workers had vanished visually which meant that I had to automate my 300 workers.

4 - Turn 474 Railroads invented and whilst the guy was talking about the future implications of the invention, the game crashed.

5 - I restart the game again on turn 473 and skip the one turn it would take to invent railroads, on turn 521 I have no option but to again invent RR and lo and behold the game crashes.

This is a huge frustration because I had put sixty hours playing time into this one game and I was heading for double the highest score ever posted on the HOF site!

 

[dshirk]

If you post a save, we can take a look. Thanks!

 

[TractorBoy]

If you post a save, we can take a look. Thanks!

On the HOF site you have to autsave every single turn and I have tried to reload from turn 521 back per turn to 514 without any success.

What would you be able to work out from a save?

Would you be requiring save 473 or a higher number?

Thanks.

EDIT.... I am contnuing to try and load one of the autosaves, got back to 510 now without success and each time I have to control alt del, this is a nightmare!

 

[TractorBoy]

1 - Turn 480 game crashed.

At this point the save became 2.01 megabites, could this be a factor?

By getting Railroads on turn 473 and automatically putting 200 railheads in my Cities, would this also have pushed the save (individual turn) to more than 2 megs?

 

[buchengshi]

I doubt it's because the saves are over 2MB. The saves in my current game are running a little over 2.6MB.

What are your actual system specs? "...the top end of all the specs required to play civV" doesn't mean anything. I interpret it as "my computer has specs equivalent to the recommended", which isn't relly adequate for playing on huge maps.

If it's crashing when railroads is researched, post a save from before that happens. The older the better, IMO, so 473 would be a good place to start.

 

[TractorBoy]

Specs are well in excess of the requirements;
1tb HD
i7 Processor
8gb RAM
AMD Radeon HD7570

Which outstrips the reccomended by a fair bit...

Not sure a screenshot is going to show much, would just show a farmless map...

Attached the only first autosave I could make work (working backwards from 521...) try it for yourselves, just don't change the research from railroads... If it does work let me know.
Was looking for something in one of the .ini files for a max cap on the file save limit. Couldn't find a thing, if anyone knows where this is please let me know!

 

[krc]

Getting railroads does not immediately crash the game for me. It is clear, however, that the graphics system is put under tremendous stress. As you pointed out, existing farms have disappeared (but when you mouse-over, they pop-up shows that there should be a farm there). And the game slows down immediately after railroad is researched. When auto-scroling to te next unit, it takes longer and there are gray tiles that are slower to keep up, even though they do fill in eventually.

I didn't play on long enough to see what happens when you actually build railroads, but I can believe that the extra graphics strain of loading those images on top will make it crash....

 

[buchengshi]

Tha game plays just fine for me. There was a pause when I finished railroads (which I thought was going to be a hang), but it was normal after that. Still getting a solid 59.1 fps (vsync), units cycle normally, turn times are no longer.

I suspect the problem is your GPU. The 7570 is low end. AMD doesn't even sell them to the public, since it's an OEM item. The specs on it vary widely: 512MB-2GB, 28-64GB/s bandwidth, only 480 stream processors. I saw I was using over 1.5GB of VRAM playing, so if you have less than that it would probably cause slowdowns too.

You don't mention which i7 you have, but given the low-end GPU I'm assuming it's not one of the high-end ones. (I'd guess you have a Dell or HP.)

I know someone is probably thinking "Oh, he should be able to run it just fine, it's only Civ": Check the save. He has 150 cities and 215 units. I've been planting the settlers, so it's up to 155 now. That's got to be taxing for a computer with a low end GPU.

I would try turning down some of the graphics settings, or maybe run it in DX9 mode.

For reference, I have: i7-3930K @ 4GHz, 2x 3GB GTX580, 16GB @2000MHz. And use a Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the greatest pointing device in the history of mankind! (Last bit irrelevant to the discussion )

 

[TractorBoy]

As you pointed out, existing farms have disappeared (but when you mouse-over, they pop-up shows that there should be a farm there). And the game slows down immediately after railroad is researched. When auto-scroling to te next unit, it takes longer and there are gray tiles that are slower to keep up, even though they do fill in eventually.

Thanks for your response, I am sorry this has also happened to you, atleast you are now aware of the problems you face if ever you want to play a huge marathon game. From my point of view it's good to know that I am not alone and there is nothing wrong with my pc.

 

[TractorBoy]

I would try turning down some of the graphics settings, or maybe run it in DX9 mode.

Thanks very much for all your help, I am trying a new game with DX9 and I have to say I prefer the graphics, it's early days yet but when I have been playing for fifty hours or so and reach the point of discovering Railroads I will report back to this thread with the results!

 

[krc]

Thanks very much for all your help, I am trying a new game with DX9 and I have to say I prefer the graphics, it's early days yet but when I have been playing for fifty hours or so and reach the point of discovering Railroads I will report back to this thread with the results!

You should be able to open your existing game in DX9 and find out how well it works there.....

 

[Jerman]

A bit of Recommendation. Disband some workers. Maybe the 300 automated workers all get the same order to build railroads and the game crashes.