Warlords 2.08: Freezes and CTDs

[46852]

I'm having some annoying crashes on my fresh copy of Warlords that has been patched to 2.08.

At first the game played fine for several hours for one session, but the game ended to a freeze. Freeze = couldn't do anything, only power off helped me out of it. That was in full-screen mode.

I noticed that Civ4 used my GFX card quite efficiently, and it overheated a bit and caused some minor graphic glitches, so I tuned it down and thought I had the problem right there.

Game played fine for a bit again, and then a freeze again. Sometimes the freezes came when diplomacy was being done, and sometimes straight out of the blue on the strategy map.

I was quite sure the problem was in my system as I had just recently tweaked and overclocked it (although no other game had any problems, Medieval Total War 2 and X3 running fine among others), but my suspicions were proved wrong as I started getting error reports when starting a new game or loading a saved game: during loading, the game crashes and gives an error message caused by Civ4Warlords.exe with all the hexadecimal stuff with it (can post it later if someone finds it useful).

Soooo, anyone else with similar problems or solutions to my problems?

My specs:
AMD Athlon 2.1GHz (overclocked, temperatures perfectly fine during crashes)
1GB 333MHz DDR
nVidia 6600GT (Overheated at first, but after tuning down it stays well below critical temperatures)
Windows XP SP2

- Running Rivatuner
- Perfectly legal copies of both Civ4 and Warlords
- Patches 1.61 and 2.08 applied and re-applied after I noticed the problems

Help!

 

[Gyathaar]

Could it be that when overclocking your CPU you also overclocked the bus, and the memory has problems keeping up?

 

[46852]

Could it be that when overclocking your CPU you also overclocked the bus, and the memory has problems keeping up?

I'm starting to think it might be something related to memory too.

I have my CPU bus running at 166MHz atm, and the memory bus at the same frequency, 1:1 ratio, so I doubt the bus speed is the problem. I'd be more inclined to suspect the latencies as I've set them to quite tight setting, will have to test it out as soon as I get home. (Testing will be a royal pain in the arse as the crashes are very irregular)

The strange thing is that I've played games that should be even bigger resource hogs than Civ4 without any problems, namely MTW2 and X3... So whatever the problem is, in the end it seems that Civ4 code isn't quite as good as it should be

I'm counting out any driver-related problems because I've recently updated most of them... One troublemaker in my system in the past has been the AC97 Realtek onboard sound device, anyone else had problems with Civ4 & AC97? My current sound device drivers should be quite up-to-date, but you never know...

PS. Come to think of it, my other 512MB DDR is only 333MHz, so it's working on it's max capacity. If Civ4 is bigger memory cruncher than X3 or MTW2, that might be my bottleneck, will play around with bus speeds too.

 

[seady]

I get lockups too but with the brownouts in my area, I'm worried it might be damaged ram. Memtest claims it is ok tho?

Hope to get a UPS soon. Was getting it this week and then the oven blew. Argh! The computer gods hate me.

 

[seady]

p.s. temp is fine, not using overclocked anyhoo. Have to power off, ctl alt del does nuthink!

 

[46852]

p.s. temp is fine, not using overclocked anyhoo. Have to power off, ctl alt del does nuthink!

What graphics card do you have?

 

[fedup]

Hi

I've only recently (last 3 weeks) started to have problems with both civ4 and warlords running very very slowly. Up to then fine. Think it may be connected with save? Have disabled autosave but when I do manual saves seems to take an age ... then game clears up for 2/3 events (moves, opening cities, change of view etc) then goes back to glacial.

Since problem started I have removed and reloaded civ4+patches+warlords+patches, and done simple things like defrag. Also increased virtual memory.

Any practical help? Problem affects civ4+warlords. Game not modded.

thanks

 

[JohnYoga]

Same theme...

I go into Internet Games, and it hangs right after putting in your username and password, with no way of escape except for a hard power off.

It does not always happen for every game load, but when it does, I need to power cycle-attempt log-in at least two times before it allows me in.

Regards,

John

 

[Chuggi]

I used to play the HUGE sized maps, and when I got about into the industrial era in the game it sometimes randomly ctd - usually when I zoomed out to the global view. I think that was memory related because it only did it on larger maps.