Civ3 drives me crazy!!

broman · March 30, 2002, 11:07

I am really getting sick of Civ3. After buying the game, i found out it rarely did function. So i downloaded a internet cracked version, which also had a lot of errors, but at least worked. Trying to improve it with the 1.17 patch, the whole thing crewed up.

It is an absolutely wast of money. Civ3 is a SHAME to the civilization games.

Ethelred · March 30, 2002, 12:41

Would you like help getting it running right or is it the game itself you have a problem with?

If you want help with crashing please give your system specs and a description of what is happening. The whole thing screwed up is not exactly informative. Every bit of information you give can be bit that helps find the problem.

In the meantime make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card, sound card and if it needs any the mother board.

Specs include but are not limited to

Mother board
CPU
RAM
Video card
Sound card
Operating system

If you are tech saavy you may also have tried tweaking things. So those too. They don't always work as well as the default setting.

You may need to uninstall Civ III and delete its folder to be sure everything is cleared out. You may want to copy the save game folder to someplace safe before before you do that.

Older saves may be corrupted in any case. The original version did that sometimes.

Reinstall with the CD in the drive you will be playing the game from. Not from a different drive. Lots of games have that problem not just Civ III so its a good idea to do it with all your games just in case. They shouldn't have the problem but they often do.

Cracked games are more likely to be buggy. Especially since patches are not designed to help those things. Some may even deliberate break the crack. If I was patching a game I would certainly break the cracks.

Civ III uses Direct X 8.1 yet somehow people have managed to install the game and run it with Direct X 7. Be sure you have Direct X 8.1.

I would install the game and before playing I would install the patch. Either 1.16f or 1.17f. Some people can't stand the latest patch because of the rapid tech trading by the AI. But do install one of the two to get rid of the bugs.

broman · March 30, 2002, 17:39

ok, lets give it another try.

I removed and reinstalled the game again and installed the 1.17f patch. No problems their. I also installed directx 8.1.

When i start the game now, it gets stuck in the first picture (the civ3 castle), I can hear the cd running but nothing happens. I also noticed that a program is running named: ~ef7194

I am running windows 98 first edition.
System specifications:
atlon amd 700 mhz processor with a matching motherboard.
384 mb RAM memory
20 gb harddisk with plenty of space left
nvidia geforce 2 MX/MX 400 ver 4.0 videocard
a standard soundcard
and the civ3 cd is in a 52 speed cd-player

I hope you can help me

Spec · March 30, 2002, 20:42

Quote:

Originally posted by broman
I am really getting sick of Civ3. After buying the game, i found out it rarely did function. So i downloaded a internet cracked version, which also had a lot of errors, but at least worked. Trying to improve it with the 1.17 patch, the whole thing crewed up.

It is an absolutely wast of money. Civ3 is a SHAME to the civilization games.

Then stop playin man. It works fine with me
Maybe your system is corrupt somewhere. Have you thought of that?

Spec.

Coracle · March 31, 2002, 00:15

My version of Civ III works perfectly and always has - but it is still effed up and drives me crazy. That's what happens when a beta product is thrown on the market for the Holiday buying season.

Ethelred · March 31, 2002, 02:46

Quote:

Originally posted by broman
ok, lets give it another try.

I removed and reinstalled the game again and installed the 1.17f patch. No problems their. I also installed directx 8.1.

When i start the game now, it gets stuck in the first picture (the civ3 castle), I can hear the cd running but nothing happens. I also noticed that a program is running named: ~ef7194

OK first we know the your CD can deal with the copy protection enough to install.

You have the right Direct X.

Quote:

I am running windows 98 first edition.
System specifications:
atlon amd 700 mhz processor with a matching motherboard.
384 mb RAM memory
20 gb harddisk with plenty of space left
nvidia geforce 2 MX/MX 400 ver 4.0 videocard
a standard soundcard
and the civ3 cd is in a 52 speed cd-player
I hope you can help me

It may still be the CD. Some simply can't deal with Safedisk II. But you did get it installed.

Athlon mother boards all need drivers. Intel mother boards generally don't. XP has the drivers for most mother boards but not necissarily the the latest. However you have Win 98 original. SO

First thing in the quest. This may take a while.

Go to Windows update for 98. Make sure you are udated and if you aren't it may take more than one trip. Not all of the updates can be installed the first go.

http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp

I think that will get you there but I am running XP. If not then

http://www.microsoft.com/ms.htm

And on the left you will see a link for Windows Update

You may be able to bypass what comes next. If your PC was made by a large company and they istalled all the present parts they may have all the drivers on their own web site. I suggest that you go there if that is the case.

However if you have built it yourself or had a hole in the wall shop build it or a friend or you have modified it a lot you may need to do these things.

Next if you know your what your mother board is go the manufacturers site and get the latest updates. BIOS and drivers.

That may fix any problems. Be very carefull with BIOS udates. Print out the instructions so you can follow the later. You will most likely need a floppy disk that you can boot to dos with.

The 4 in 1 drivers for Via chipsets are updated frequently. They make a mess of a lot of games and hardware if you don't have the latest and greatest. Sometimes even if you do. Those will be available from the motherboard manufacturer.

Your CD reader may also have a firmware update available. That can help if you are having a Safedisk problem.

The Nvidia drivers are generally very good. You do still want to have the latest.

The latest official drivers for Win 98 can be found here

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=windows9x

There are usually scads of leaked drivers out as well. I don't have any links for the fan sites though as I have an ATI card. A search on Google for Nvidia drivers should turn something up if you want something new than the official drivers. Beta users beware.

There really isn't such a thing as a standard sound card. However you may actually have the latest drivers anyway. If its a chip on the mother board the manufacturer of the mother board should have the latest.

If you have a Soundblaster Live chip however you will want the latest on their site.

http://www.soundblaster.com/

Root around in the downloads area. The link is on the left.

You didn't mention any tweeks. If you have messed with the virtual memory or the swap file those tweeks can cause problems. They can help too if done right. But tweaks won't fix your problem they will just optimize things and sometimes bugger things up instead.

I think you may have a CD problem based on where you are stopping. Could be video though as a video comes up first.

One thing may be of help is a full install instead of the minimal install. That way the game only checks the CD once at the beginning.

Anyway I would start with windows update cause its the easiest. Then I would track down the CD manufacturers site and check for a firmware update. Nvidia comes next.

IF the CD is generic then you may have a problem you can't get rid of except by replacing it. Other games will have the problem in the future. Safedisk II is not going away except to be replaced by something that may be even harder to deal with.

I am running the game on a 16X DVD drive I got for about 40 bucks months ago. I have no idea who made it. Its better than the Pioneer 104S I had before. Quieter mostly. That Pioneer clicked and whirred and annoyed.

DaShi · March 31, 2002, 05:12

Quote:

Originally posted by Spectator

Then stop playin man. It works fine with me
Maybe your system is corrupt somewhere. Have you thought of that?

Spec.

I agree. Stop playing and post more.

broman · March 31, 2002, 06:10

Thanx Ethelred
I think i solved the problem.
You were right, it was the cd-player. When I use the DVD-player it works.

Sorry you had to type such a long reply.

Hopefully the game itself is better with the new patch.

Ethelred · March 31, 2002, 06:46

Your welcome.

Most parts of the game are better.

My favorite change is simply that SHIFT-A now works right. SHIFT-P for pollution hasn't changed but if you set most of the workers to Shift-A they will now actually leave improvements alone and they have a very high priority for cleaning pollution. Its the only thing they will put more than two workers on.

The AI now trades tech pretty aggresivley. If you don't trade with them it will look like they are ganging up on because you will fall behind at least in the early game. Because of this even on middle levels the tech is going pretty fast. I launched before 1750 in my first game on Emperor.

Good luck with the game.

Venger · March 31, 2002, 10:41

Etherld is quite right - the Safedisc 2 protection used by Civ3 is VERY tempermental, to the point that it actually will not work with a legitimate CD in very many drives...

Of course, not everyone has a DVD player to fall back on - meaning alot of people just can't play it. That sucks. SD2 sucks.

Alas, I have a burner that burns SD2, so the first thing I do is burn a backup copy, and play with it - no reason to scratch the hell out of the original.

Venger

Ethelred · March 31, 2002, 11:16

I am curious as to the model of burner. I have a Plextwriter 16/10/40a with the latest firmware upgrade.

Good burner mostly but it doesn't like it when I use a black marker on cheap CDs that don't have opaque labels.

Raion · March 31, 2002, 15:57

The real truth here:

I have Windows98SE and upgraded IE5.5, it is because of upgrades from Microsoft that the game did not run for me.

The opening movie would lock up the game, finally I tried the bink file in the Windows 2000 folder on the CD. Then both sound and the game worked, otherwise, if I used the bink file for normal or for Windows 98, the game will lock up on the opening movie.

For a time there, I was renaming the sound.dll file in the Civ folder to sound.dl_ as I did with SMAC, because of that, the game would play then but no sound.

Using the bink file for Windows 2000, solved the problem.

Now, all I do is restart the game after playing every time.

I also had an ATI graphics card, but the drivers were corrupting gdi32.dll and another file when playing the game, andl I was always not sure, but usually had to replace those files.

When I got a GeForce type 2 MX400 and the drivers for that video card, the files quit being corrupted.

Civ III only uses DirectX 8 or 8.0a version, 8.1 version is not needed.

You see, Microsoft upgraded Explorer from IE upgrades that replaced certain files, Explorer is one of them that is from IE now, and not from the original OS like Windows 98.

Might want to run in Add/Remove programs, Removing IE from the system, of course, what comes up, is a program to fix IE instead of uninstall it, since its intergrated into the OS now, or re-install the previous version (probably IE4) or actually uninstall it.

To fix Explorer for the OS, one has to fix the IE upgrades downloaded from Microsoft.

Well, after all that, and a couple of months, the game seems to work fine, unless one mods the Civ3mod.bic file which is the rules of the game, just can not start saved games after modding the Civ3mod.bic file, have to start a new game.

etc, etc, blah, blah, well, I think one gets the Virtual Reality of making games for anything in this world.

Then the game will bug you when you play, nothing new here!

Willem · March 31, 2002, 22:15

Quote:

Originally posted by Raion

Well, after all that, and a couple of months, the game seems to work fine, unless one mods the Civ3mod.bic file which is the rules of the game, just can not start saved games after modding the Civ3mod.bic file, have to start a new game.

I suspect that's because you might have the wrong editor. When the 1.17f patch was released, it came with an editor that wasn't compatible, for some reason. Any changes made will mean the game won't start. You can check this by looking at the version number of the editor. It should be 1.15, or some sort of variant. The one sent out with the patch was 1.17.

Also, if you're adding anything like units etc, you won't be able to reload your saved games. You can change some of the parameters of what already exists, but you can't add anything new or it won't load. It's not a bug, it's just the way the game uses the Bic file. I admit it's a pain when you're trying to mod something, you always have to start from the beginning of the game. It took me forever to hammer out the changes I wanted to make.