Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Graeme Dice]

And Firaxis didn't really care whether ATI users could play their game within two months of buying it, or whether anyone could play more than 2 hours without a crash or more than 10 turns (mid game) without restarting.

The lead developer certainly cared.
Civ 4 Problems

[Atrocities]

SimCity 3 was better after the Rush Hour expansion pack came out. So yes, it was broken at game launch.

[Graeme Dice]

Imperator Fyron said:
Irrelevant. There is no reason why the game shouldn't have been able to run _at all_ with 1 version out of date drivers.

It wasn't a problem with having 9.0b. It was a problem where the install routine Microsoft provided didn't upgrade 9.0c installs to the latest version of 9.0c.

More like, extremely high. There is no excuse for a $50 game from a huge company to crash in anything but the most obscure of situations.

Have you ever played more than a half dozen various games? Games have crashed every few hours well back into the DOS era.

The game would crash _every turn_ after playing for a while in many cases... It was absurd.

Did you make any attempts to fix your computer if the crashes were that common?

[Fyron]

Graeme Dice said:
It wasn't a problem with having 9.0b. It was a problem where the install routine Microsoft provided didn't upgrade 9.0c installs to the latest version of 9.0c.

Please don't shift the blame away from Firaxis here. A patch of the game fixed the problems without ANY reinstalls of DirectX or video card drivers. They did not test the environment very well and did not initially make the game able to run well with those older drivers or versions of DirectX.

Have you ever played more than a half dozen various games? Games have crashed every few hours well back into the DOS era.

I have played many games, and stop playing the ones that have inexplicable, repeating crashes. Very few games I have ever seen crash periodically _in the middle of every turn_. Forget every few hours... It is not excusable for anyone to release horridly buggy games. I no longer buy games before trying them out because of this widespread beta-as-release phenomenom.

Did you make any attempts to fix your computer if the crashes were that common?

My computer was never broken or in even slightly bad shape. The computer never crashed, only Civ 4 crashed. In the first version that wouldn't even have the game start, I did attempt to perform the ridiculous procedure that Firaxis posted of reinstalling drivers and the game, but it did nothing to alleviate that problem. After some patches it would run, but crash once the game had progressed to a certain point. There was nothing for me to fix, short of hex editing fixes into the Civ4 exe, since there was never anything wrong with my computer, but with the game. Now that they are finally progressing from the beta stage, the game runs rather smoothly, without any further dicking around with reinstalling drivers and DirectX.

Anyways, this thread is about GalCiv II, not Civ4, so I won't post anything further about it in this thread.

[Graeme Dice]

Imperator Fyron said:
They did not test the environment very well and did not initially make the game able to run well with those older drivers or versions of DirectX.

Running old versions of DirectX and old drivers is the users fault, not the developers.

I have played many games, and stop playing the ones that have inexplicable, repeating crashes. Very few games I have ever seen crash periodically _in the middle of every turn_.

Then you haven't played very many games at all, and especially not many DOS games as I said. Random, unpredictable, even predictable crashes have always been, and always will be part of PC games.

I no longer buy games before trying them out because of this widespread beta-as-release phenomenom.

Please don't attempt to rationalize a justification for piracy.

My computer was never broken or in even slightly bad shape.

How do you know? Did you make any attempt to fix the dozen or so problems that all computers have. Did you purge your registry of entries from programs that you uninstalled months ago? Did you update all your drivers? I dislike it when people aren't willing to perform even basic maintenance on their computers before making complaints.

[Renegade 13]

In reference to frequency of crashing, SEIV has only crashed on me once in all the years I've played. Now THAT is impressive! Few games can be played for at least 1000 hours with only a single crash.

Can't even remember what exactly caused the error, it was an RCE but for the life of me I can't remember when it occurred.

[Kamog]

SEIV has *never* crashed on me since I switched to Windows XP last year. And I've spent hundreds of hours playing.

Now, SEIV used to crash quite often when I had Windows ME, especially when I used ALT-TAB to switch between SEIV and other programs. But it was a Windows ME problem and not an SEIV problem.

[Atrocities]

I have gotten SEIV to crash on me several times. Most often while playing the Expanded Mod with uber huge systems.

I will say though, RCE's are pretty much history. I have not seen an RCE since 1.49. Well one or two since then, but mostly do to issues that were addressed in 1.94.

Supporting a game going on six years after its release has to be a world record. Aaron should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize along with having his name in the Ginues Books (sp) for superior game support.

If the big boys played by Aarons rules, games would have a lot longer shelf and life span. SIX YEARS! This is simply unheard of! A First! The Fifth X in 4x gaming, eXceptional support!