Straight from the horse's mouth - recommended hardware specifications not enough ?

[microbe]

I hope most folks can see how something this obscure, which is not reproduceable until after you isolate the cause, can slip through testing.

The bug slipped through because the testers were only testing on high-end machines.

 

[tmarcl]

You are entitled to your opinion, whether or not it's informed or reasonable, but you are not entitled to drag my name along in an effort to draw more attention to your opinion. What you've done to me here today is wrong. If you want to state your opinion, then state YOUR opinion and let it stand on its own two feet. Propping up your views with my name... Don't do that again.

Sirian, don't take this the wrong way, but yes, he is entitled to do it. You posted your comments on a public forum, which means they're open to anyone to grab and use as they see fit. Beyond that, "appealing to authority" is a standard debating tool. You are an authority, and he used what you said to support his opinion. While it may not have been what you meant, he still has the right to quote you.

As for this entire thread (just to get back on topic), to an extent, I agree with him. While it's certainly impossible to please everybody, I think that the least Firaxis could have done (or even you beta testers) was to let us know exactly what 'Recommended Requirements' meant. It also wouldn't have hurt for you (general) to have told us ahead of time how the game ran on different settings.

Certainly, none of you were obligated to do this, and I don't hold it against you that you didn't. The game runs fine for me on my just-above recommended settings computer on Standard size, medium graphics quality. Given how well you must know the people on this forum by now (you've been a member for four years), you probably could have guessed that people would like to play on huge maps, and if so, they might like to know ahead of time if they needed to upgrade.

Again, I concede that none of this was the responsibility of Firaxis or the beta testers. In fact, IMO, you gave us more of a preview then anyone had a right to expect, and you're certainly doing a great job with your SG with Sulla-I, and I expect a lot of people, are learning a lot from it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is-try to see it from our point of view. Many of us don't have state of the art computers, and we're frustrated with not being able to do everything we want to do, even with what is listed as 'Recommended Requirements.'

As for the rest of you (ok, us), don't be so nasty in your posts. Just because the game doesn't do everything you expect it to, doesn't mean you should be tearing into the designers, beta testers, or their pets. Try and keep your tones civil, tell people what the problem is, and if they can solve it, great. If not, don't get all frustrated because things aren't going your way. Remember, screaming at someone at the top of your lungs is more likely to cause them to get earplugs. Talking to them civily will get you, if not your problem solved, at least a lot closer to your solution.

Marc

 

[fishlore]

I guess it's pretty ironic that so many of the unfortunate people with issues (not necesarily people from this thread) are the same people that dogged people like me who said that the move to 3D would alienate a large portion of the fanbase. Remember when someone would come in and say things like "you'll have to play smaller maps to make up for the increase in system resources?" They'd get jumped upon and labeled stupid. Ahh the good old days where the people who didn't like the change in graphics were fools with bad taste. I bet a lot of people would take Civ 3 graphics right about now.

Well here I am loving this game, still not impressed with the graphics though, with my almost outdated system happily playing my life away. I haven't encountered any of the issues people have been talking about including the ATI Radeon issues. I feel bad for the people that can't get it to work but I have a hard time feeling sypathetic towards the people that forgot how to treat others with respect.

AMD 2800
Radeon 9700
1 gig RAM
SB Audigy

 

[Sirian]

The bug slipped through because the testers were only testing on high-end machines.

That's just not correct.

I guess what I'm trying to say is-try to see it from our point of view. Many of us don't have state of the art computers, and we're frustrated with not being able to do everything we want to do, even with what is listed as 'Recommended Requirements.'

My machine is BELOW recommended requirements (though above the minimums), and I've been running Civ4 on it for 20 months. So how am I NOT seeing this issue from your point of view?

No matter how many times I reiterate this point, it doesn't seem to be sticking for some folks.


I'll be upgrading before year's end, but not because of Civ4. I'm simply due to upgrade. My last upgrade came when Civ3 was still brand new.


- Sirian

 

[microbe]

That's just not correct.

Then I was too optimistic.

There are 3 possibilities:

1) testers were testing on high-end machines so nobody could issue two commands fast enough to trigger the bug
2) nobody bothered to test the scenario of issuing commands fast - game not tested enough, blame the testers
3) Firaxis knew about the bug but decided to not fix it (couldn't find the cause, too many other bugs to fix, etc) - blame the developers

Choose one.

 

[spankey]

The bug slipped through because the testers were only testing on high-end machines.

I have read several posts from testers that have lower end machines than mine: Compaq Presario 2.7 Ghz celeron, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB PCI NVDIA GEforce 5500, onboard sound card. My machine plays the game well, with only the minor stuttering of sound on intro and wonder movies. Of couse I have only been playing for a week and I have been playing standard maps to learn the game.
There is a lot of passion about this, but I definitely learned more about my computer through this game and updating drivers. I guess I responded to this because I don't believe this statement is totally accurate...

 

[ChuckLe]

Then I was too optimistic.

There are 3 possibilities:

1) testers were testing on high-end machines so nobody could issue two commands fast enough to trigger the bug
2) nobody bothered to test the scenario of issuing commands fast - game not tested enough, blame the testers
3) Firaxis knew about the bug but decided to not fix it (couldn't find the cause, too many other bugs to fix, etc) - blame the developers

Choose one.

4) The GUI is so slow that even issuing ONE command and waiting for a response took too long for anyone to notice the effect of multiple commands.

 

[Clown2TheLeft]

perhaps, Microbe, you can define what constitutes a "high-end" machine. I'm curious.

Later!

--The Clown to the Left

 

[oldStatesman]

My machine is BELOW recommended requirements (though above the minimums), and I've been running Civ4 on it for 20 months. So how am I NOT seeing this issue from your point of view?

No matter how many times I reiterate this point, it doesn't seem to be sticking for some folks.
- Sirian

To be fair, that means you were able to adjust to the changes gradually - since you were running many many alpha and beta builds...and you were able to compensate over time for any issues. Plus you had direct support from the developers for any questions...a luxury the regular user does not have.

We had to load the gold release build (one I'm fairly sure you personally did not test extensively, due to it's nature) from scratch. We had to rely on the technical specs listed. We had no period of adjustment, no developers to help out with issues...in fact, no real 'official' support on the T2 site at all for the first few days, and a poor effort on phone support initially - they were simply unprepared there. None of these are your issue - or responsibility, and you should not be held personally accountable for those. That is wrong.

But... you may not have had the 'fun' of seeing the issues that thousands of users will uncover that come with the gold build, as you stated several posts ago, partly because you had already been innoculated to them because your machine had been fine tuned to Civ4 over 20 months of testing.


I applaud the dedication and effort you put into this - but it is also human nature to see things differently depending on the filters experience has provided. 'Our' viewpoint and 'yours' are not going to match exactly, and it is hard for those on one side of the issue to really understand those on the other side.

 

[Dark Helmet]

Firaxis could have done a better job. Anyone who says otherwise is only fooling themselves. To those of you who can play with "no problems" - good for you, I am glad at least some people can enjoy it. Unfortunately, many people cannot. Hell, I can't even get the game to start! Don't try and make me or anyone else feel bad about raising a stink over this. You better be damned sure I am going to make noise about a problem, I paid them money for a product they told me would work...and it didn't, and I can't get my money back. On top of that, how else can any of us be sure Firaxis (or any other developer) listens to us unless we make a ruckus!?

Do you seriously think a submissive approach of "Let me ask timidly if they plan to fix this, and if no one answers I will shutup because to post again would be rude and those poor developers have enough problems as is counting all that money."

The whole point to beta testing is to try as many weird things as possible to see if the game crashes so you can report it. Beta tester is not worth their salt otherwise. Screw around with menus by swapping fast between them, right-clicking on every tile, you know, screwy stuff. Not just regular game play all by itself, any chump can do that.

PROBLEM: "I left-click on my warrior 100 times and then tell him to move and the game crashes!"
ANSWER: "We will look into that, never tried that before."

This is good. No game is 100% rock solid, and no one is saying it should be on shipping day. Weird problems like that need to be ironed out.

PROBLEM: "After reaching the Industrial age on a Huge Map with 18 empires, the game becomes incredibly sluggish".
ANSWER: "We will look into that, never tried that before."

This is bad. Very bad. Even with all the magnificent varieties of computers that fall in the 'recommended' range, this shouldn't of even made it to Beta.

Someone dropped the ball, and all I am asking is that they pick said ball back up so I can play the game.

 

[Islandia]

I haven't had any CTD's while playing single player though I have noticed that there does indeed seem to be a memory leak. I usually leave my game of civ4 running on one machine while I'm working on another one so I have had the game running for 24-48 hours at a time. It truly starts bogging down after a while even on a standard size map. Overall though I haven't had any problems with the single player and none of my friends who are all avid gamers have had problems running Civ4 at all. Of course we come from the RTS/FPS gaming background where we try to keep our machines as up to date as possible, though I don't consider my machine to be high end (P4 3.2 gigahertz, 2 gigs of ram and an ATI x800 which was purchased over a year ago). My machine runs the game at 1920x1200 resolution with the 2x antialiasing (and has SQL server running in the background), and does just fine for the first few hours of play. I think the level of expectations is just unrealistic if you have a 2 year old machine that you expect to play the largest maps at the highest settings with full AA and everything else. The requirements for Battlefield 2, AOE 3, Fable, and many of the other games I've played in the past year have been a lot higher than for Civ4. (And just wait til you see the requirements for Supreme Commander

But someone really dropped the ball in multiplayer. It is quite obvious there was no stress testing done on the multiplayer game lobby because the super buggy "always refreshing" grid and the crash to desktop every 2 minutes if we're lucky. I really hope the first patch fixes the lobby so that we can get a few more enjoyable games of multiplayer civ in.

 

[tristangreer]

What is really sad is to think that Sirian can run his game well on his machine, while mine meets all the recommended specs and the game becomes absolutely unplayable in the late game.

Hopefully the fact that better machines seem to be having slowdown issues (even machines as good as 3.5GB ram have had immense slowdown) is because of a bug or bad programming. I'd hate to think that most people will have to buy 2GB RAM to play the game well, as many, many people with 1GB RAM have had enormous slowdown issues in the late game.

Makes you wonder if Firaxis also sells RAM.

 

[warpstorm]

Beyond that, "appealing to authority" is a standard debating tool.

Yes, it is one of the many forms of fallacious argument out there. The fact that it has a name goes to show you why you should be on the lookout for it in debates and generally discard what people have to say that use it as part of their argument.

 

[sturmtrupp]

I played `8 civs on only standard map, and by the modern age, I have to wait like 5 minutes for each turn to end, not to mention the increased frequency of 'crashing to desktop'.
Tell me why I should believe that they actually did adequate testing on this thing.
My spec is the following:
AMD FX - 57
nVidia 6800GT
1 gb Corsair RAM
250 gb SATAII HDD

I am actually very surprised, I play HUGE map, with 15 Civs and I only wait about 5-10 seconds. There are longer waits when getting new maps, like maybe 10-15 seconds.

My system is,
AMD X2 4200+
nvidia gf7 gt
1.5 Gbytes RAM
250 Gb SATA HDD.

Not too much different really. Perhaps its whats running in the background, and/or the OS setup???

 

[sturmtrupp]

I have no problem with my PC. It can run Battlefied 2, Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires 3 and all the other much more sophisticated games than Civ4 flawlessly, on high graphic setting. Not to mention my 37 inch plasma monitor rocks.
But civ4 has huge memory leak issues, unless you have tons of memory to leak, by time you have completed 7 or 8 hours of game play it will get bugged down no matter what.

Those games are also a lot less CPU/Memory intensive. Furthermore, I have not experienced huge memory leak issues but then again I have not played 8 hours straight. Quick soln' would be to close and restart app, but something that if true should be fixed in the patch.

 

[ChuckLe]

Civ2 fans absolutely jeered Civ2's pathfinding, and its flaws undercut AI performance. They also jeered the AI. So Civ3 fixed the problem, adding TRUE pathfinding to the game. Now the AI is competent and then some, but that comes at a cost: true pathfinding is a blunt instrument that eats CPU cycles like mad. This is exponentially worse on larger maps, leading to folks like the Original Poster in this thread panning the game for being slow. So Firaxis responds to Civ fans and DELIVERS what they hungered for: a smarter AI. And some slam the game for being slower. "UNACCEPTABLE," they say.

I don't know how I managed to miss this first time around. Probably because of the volume of traffic here; but...

What a pitifully lame excuse to cover up for for a useless GUI!

What on earth does pressing one of the F keys to access an adviser that takes 10 seconds, or toggling the tile grid icon by clicking on it and the map drawing the overlay 30+ seconds later have to do with AI?

What does waiting 45 seconds or more for the globe view to appear after clicking on that particular icon have to do with AI?

What does scrolling the map (slideshow fashion) have to do with AI?

It's an event driven GUI isn't it?

 

[yoshi]

The bug slipped through because the testers were only testing on high-end machines.

The specific problem here seems to be with people's cards and certain system settings, not RAM, CPUs or boards.

[EDIT: I'm talking about the crashes here. Slow performance is not a legitimate complaint unless you have an average machine, in which case you're probably within your rights to complain if high performance games run properly but Civ4 is sluggish--see rest of post.)

The argument can be summed up thus: From a developer's perspective, the jump to 3D was unavoidable at this stage in games software development.

But the counter-argument is this (and indeed this is applies to the industry as a whole): why should players have to be computer-savy just to play games?

The player can only be expected to worry about base system performance; expecting players to balance what hardware will work best with what games software is absurd--especially considering the financial cost of all this.

(Asking players to act like above-average users is like saying that only people with auto-mechanics skills should drive cars.)

And in addition to that, this is TBS; a genere that has no practical justification for gfx (from the gameplay perspective).

Conclusion: It is only reasonable for a developer willing to take a risk with a TBS title to properly test with varying system combinations.

That is, if players meet the requirements and complain when the program fails, they are right to do so. This may not seem fair to Firaxis, but that's the way it is.

Likewise, if developing a patch to deal with this problem proves costly, it's part of the deal.

 

[Harkonnen]

About pathfinding in civ3... It annoyed me with civ3 at huge archipelago maps, but.... Don't developers know 50-years-or-so-old algorithm of BFS? It slugged down when someone build/destroyed airport/harbor. Performing 13 BFS'es (as per civ due to wars) shouldn't take 10 seconds on 1.5Ghz machine...

Also, road destruction sometimes led to these recomputations, but this road wasn't necessarily a bridge in city graph - i.e. it was some heuristic when the first algorithm learnt with graphs is BFS (painting problem, etc...)

 

[j_buckingham80]

My wife and I have both been fortunate, the game has worked without exception on both of our computers, the game loads quicker on her computer than mine (which is to be expected) but it's nothing unreasonable. When I was first reading these boards to see what to expect I was quite concerned, but either I've been fortunate, or those with problems have been unfortunate.

In any event, some of the hostility displayed towards either the developers, the beta testers, or individuals has seemed quite over the top. It definately sucks to not have the game work right, and certainly one has every right to complain and ought to complain about the situation (the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that). Just stepping back from some of the charges of malice would probably be postive (just an observation not directed at anyone in particular). I for one, am thrilled to not have to wait until Feb. 5th to play the game as they iron out every conceivable bug. It's just impossible. The resources don't exist to do such a thing until the game gets out to the public and is run on a million different systems. Maybe one abhors this kind of "gamma" testing, but in my experience its been this game with pretty much every game I've played since conventional DOS got replaced by Windows 95. Before that, it was just running memmaker, boot disks, manually rewriting the autoexec and config files. Whatever, part of computer game life I guess. I will say, I guess some people have had problems with MP, I've played a number of different games MP, and I've been impressed with the CIV4 multi so far, no drops no probs. no nothing. That's pretty uncommon in my experience. Although I can say RoN was a similar experience.

When I first read some of the comments on the board I was concerned that Civ4 got Moo3'd (I'm sure most of you know what I mean by that). However, after actually experiencing the game for myself, I can say I'm quite happy with it and enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed every other civ to date. A whole lot.

FWIW, my computer doesn't even meet the rec. specs or so it tells me, but I haven't had a problem, Also I'm playing on a Terra map in the 1900s currently in MP and its been operating fine. Well other than the fact that the comp was being mean to my wife. So I had to teach it a lesson, but I guess it was just doing what it was supposed to.

 

[Lobox]

I have no problem with my PC. It can run Battlefied 2, Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires 3 and all the other much more sophisticated games than Civ4 flawlessly, on high graphic setting. Not to mention my 37 inch plasma monitor rocks.
But civ4 has huge memory leak issues, unless you have tons of memory to leak, by time you have completed 7 or 8 hours of game play it will get bugged down no matter what.

Nice monitor.
You should maybe buy 1 Gb RAM more, especially for BF2.
I have been playing now almost 2 hours and Civ4 is using 880 Mb RAM at the moment, I havent checked that before.