Runs very slowly

[wildcard16]

Got Civ4, Warlords, Colonization, and BTS on Steam. Played BTS about a week ago and it was fine. Tried to play it last night and it's fine until the game starts. Moving around the map is very choppy and stutters. Vanilla, Warlords, and Colonization all work great.

Tried deleting local content through Steam and re-downloading. No dice.

Aside from updating video card drivers last night in an attempt to fix it, only change to the computer that I know of is a random XP update.

DxDiag attached.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

 

[wildcard16]

Welcome to CFC

open the civilizationIV.ini and set all items with bink in their name from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 (just the opposite of what they are now). And set hidemoviebackground from 0 to 1.

Does this help at all?

This seems to have solved it! Thanks!

 

[Raby760]

That did not work for me.

When I start a new game, it keeps pausing for 10-60 seconds, then it continues, then pauses again. I've read several different forums regarding this same problem, and it doesn't appear to be a hardware issue.

I've been playing Civ 4 BTS for a few years now on the same computer.

I'm using a:
Dell Dimension 8300
Pentium 4, 3.0Ghz
2.25 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 5200 FX
WinXP

I know that my video is old and the game may require a better video card, but the game has been working for the last few years, I know it's not the video card. After I added more RAM, it would still get kind of slow towards the ending, but it's nothing like what's happening now...

Here's a list of things that I've tried.

-I've turned the graphics settings of BTS to the minimum.
-msconfig, to decrease the amount of programs that startup.
-Full virus scans with Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, Super-Antispyware.
-I ran CCleaner and Advanced System Care Free.
-Ran Scan Disk and Defragged
-Under System Properties>Advanced>Performace>Settings>Advanced>Virtual Memory
I've matched the Initial size to the Maximum size.
-I've uninstalled BTS and Civ4, the reinstalled Civ4, patched, reinstalled BTS and patched, twice so far.
-I reinstalled the video card drivers, I even tried older and newer drivers.
-I've done everything on this list on the following link:
http://mintywhite.com/xp/xcustomization/10-ways-to-improve-performance-in-windows-xp/
-I reinstalled DirectX9.0
-I tried alt-tabbing out of the game, and setting the priority of Civ4BTS to "High" under the Task Manager
-I even tried editing the Civilization.ini to the specs provided on another post. To change all of the Bing values to the opposite number. I tried changing all values too (making sure I have an original backup copy of the .ini file first).

I've tried everything I could think of. And after reading several different posts from people who have new computers with the same problem (even on the lowest settings). I don't think it has to do with the hardware. Some of these people were using new computers with iCore7 processors and newer nVidia cards. It appears to be a DirectX related or BTS game problem. Perhaps it needs another patch to fix this issue. But I don't forsee this happening since Civ5 is coming out.

This problem happens with Warlords too.

 

[Raby760]

I found a post which confirmed a fix. I had to search through this fanatic's site. I wish it would have came up on google, instead of this post...

Anyway, let me test it and post the results here, first I need to reinstall Civ4 BTS and patch, because I uninstalled Warlords and it's having that "failed initiating python" error.

 

[Raby760]

It didn't work...
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=340810

I edited the Civilization.ini file as stated, by changing the 1 to a 0 after fullscreen = , here's what it should look like:

; Specify whether to play in fullscreen mode 0/1/ask
FullScreen = 0

And that didn't solve the problem. What happens is that BTS would start in window mode. I even tried starting it in full screen mode, then editing the ini file during the BTS main screen (though it sounds illogical), and that didn't work either. And it runs slow in window mode also.

Too bad, because I just got a good map with the Aztecs, 1 pig and 1 gold inside my borders which would expand to take in another gold and a cow

I don't know if I should ask on that thread, or stay here, because this one has the most current posts. And like I said, it was running smoother in the past, so it's not my video card which is causing this problem.