WHY can't I get past Turn 300 w/o freezes?

[CaptainPatch]

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @2.66 GHz
4 Gb RAM
NVidia GeForce GTX 460 w/ 1 Gb graphic RAM (w/ most recent driver)
Windows XP (SP3)

ALL video settings have been set to Low/Minimum. (Anything higher and the game simply CTDs just before Turn 0 starts.)

I resigned myself to accepting that after @Turn 40 (if not sooner), any attempt to go back to an earlier Save requires totally exiting the game and restarting from desktop (to avoid the inevitable CTD).

But of the six games that I got as far along as to approaching Turn 300 (@285, actually), EVERY turn the game will do a hard freeze as it scrolls across the map to the next active unit, or when opening a City screen.

I've verified the game integrity after EVERY freeze, but that has zero effect on this problem.

The best I can figure is that even though I set my video down to as Low as it will go, the fact that I play on a HUGE map with 28 City-States is just too much for the program to keep track of every units and graphic change. If that IS, in fact, what is causing the freezes, then why has there been no advisories about limiting the number of City-States and active nations and map size to avoid freezes?

Since my rig is _much_ closer to the Recommended system specs than it is to the Minimum, one would **think** that any option choices presented are doable. That is, if the game allows 28 City-States, then it should work fine with 28 City-States in play. If the game allows 18 nations to be in play at once, then it should work fine with 18 nations in play. And it should be fine even if both of those maximum choices are in play simultaneously.

It's frustrating _knowing_ that EVERY turn, the game **will** freeze, requiring the PC to be rebooted. It was getting to the point where I needed to Save after every 3 or 4 actions. [Forget about turns.]

I looked at the specs of the upcoming patch. I certainly hope that ^^THIS^^ will be included in "Multiple crash fixes."

 

[CaptainPatch]

Well, this is annoying. I had been hoping to stay busy with Civ 5 until Fallout: New Vegas came out on the 19th. But now that I can NOT make it through a single turn without the game freezing up, I conclude it is _unplayable_; at least, unplayable to THE END.

I guess I'll just set it aside until the new patch actually appear, and hope that stabilizes the game (literally). Just wonder what to keep myself busy with over the weekend.

 

[kamian2345]

I had your same problem, and I managed to get rid of mine for the most part. Maybe this will help:

I've started to do the same workaround with save/load, but I also messed around a bit with the ini files.

Go to "config.ini" (default should be in "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5")

and change the setting:

"DisableHotLoading = 0" to "DisableHotLoading = 1"

Maybe someone who knows what this setting actually does can explain it better, but I think it makes your game load the graphical resources and keep it in memory for a longer period of time (and so may require more memory to maintain), but the result is a smoother transition between switching units/etc. because it doesn't have to "reload" the resources every single time we need to switch to another unit/view.

I think this is similar to the "UnitAnimationPaging" or something like that in Civ4 which gave me the same problems. I suppose this setting is helpful to "optimize" memory use for those with less RAM or whatever, but sometimes the bottleneck is not the quantity of memory but the speed to access it. (And please correct me if someone out there who actually knows this stuff and can teach us a bit about these settings)


I still notice the freeze every now and then, but it is now very minimal (like a few seconds of freeze every 10 minutes or so of smooth transitions, as opposed to every unit cycle all the time for 5-10 seconds each) after changing that one measly setting.


Hope it helps, and please share if it does or you find any other workarounds until patch

 

[MarkJohnson]

Try deleting workers. I got mine down to 23 workers with about a 3-8 second lag spike. Also, watch your cities, if you reach 70 cities in your empire it will lock forever.

There a patch coming very soon and hopefully will ix these issues, but I'm not holding my breath.

Good luck
-=Mark=-

 

[CaptainPatch]

Try deleting workers. I got mine down to 23 workers with about a 3-8 second lag spike. Also, watch your cities, if you reach 70 cities in your empire it will lock forever.
-=Mark=-

Well, 1) I've never had more than 20 Workers. (Never more than 10 until this most recent game [Game #12 I believe].) and 2) I've never had more than 12 cities.

HOWEVER, as I usually am facing off with 6-8 other nations and _28_ City-States, they probably are creating a LOT of units for the AI to keep track of. And another HOWEVER, the freezes always come during _my_ part of the turn, so those AI-controlled units are probably NOT what is causing the freezes.

Clarification: When I say "freeze", I mean a hard freeze: dead keyboard and the only way to get going again is to reboot the PC. (Which confuses the hell out of the PC; half the time it comes back up in SafeMode.)

I'll do the tinkering with the config.ini and see if that has any kind of favorable effect.

 

[CaptainPatch]

UPDATE: Tweaked the config.ini as suggested. The between turns (after hitting "Next Turn") took somewhat longer to process. It was still looking hopeful, as I actually completed a full turn without a freeze. However, after processing through the between-turns, shortly into playing the next turn the game froze up again while the camera was shifting to the Next Unit.

The fact that I could get "deeper" into the game before freezing makes me wonder if the program is getting sloppy about the RAM cache or graphic RAM cache management. That is, the cache fills up and then instead of flushing some of the older content, it "chokes" rather than continue because it can't retrieve data from a full cache. (Just theorizing; I have NO clue about how it actually works -- or doesn't. Sort of like a blind man discussing the nuances of colors. LOL)