Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Fyron]

It was only a subset of ATI cards where the game wouldn't start, and in many cases it was a matter of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0c install routine not properly updating the drivers.

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 There is no reason why the game shouldn't have been able to run _at all_ with 1 version out of date drivers.

I never experienced any crashes that I would consider regular. Even so, one crash every two hours is extremely low for any kind of game.

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

Do you have the recommended 512 MB of RAM? You'd probably want at least 1 GB to prevent slowdowns.

High amounts of RAM didn't help anyone I know. Game was still unstable and crashed a lot with a gig or more. It has been fixed now, but the beta release 1.0 was really bad...

[Saber Cherry]

I thought Starcon 3 was horrible. I derived no pleasure from it *except* for melee mode, which took no game designing, as it's been present since SC1.

I should not have said "Unplayable". In fact it was playable on most ATI cards, but there were major graphical flaws. In my case - I have 512 MB ram and a Radeon 9800 Pro, which had the latest drivers (and the latest DX) - I got no wonder videos, a black diplomacy screen 80% of the time, the screen went all *weird* when I zoomed out (orange blocks rather than cloud cover). But it was playable. However, that was after the patch that was supposed to fix problems with ATI cards.

I also had no music at all except for the intro (maybe that's the only music, I don't know), and after my fourth city, the game would slow down as time progressed so that I had to restart the game every 20 minutes or so, rather than experience 0.5 FPS. That was a memory leak combined with a graphics caching problem, I understand.

And then there were the crashes, but there were only a few of them. However, I only played for about 7 hours. Civ IV is the only game I can think of that's crashed in WinXP SP2 (though I have a bad memory). WOW crashed, but that turned out to be a motherboard problem, due to crappy Taiwanese industrial espionage (they messed up when stealing the Japanese electrolyte formulas, but used them anyway). If they didn't have a virtual monopoly, I'd never buy another Taiwanese motherboard again... and I see no reason to cut Firaxis slack for shipping a technically broken product, either. Developers know at release whether their game works or not, just like mobo makers know whether they are using black-market child-labor capacitors based on crayon drawings smuggled on the underwear label of a dyslexic Japanese janitor. The Taiwanese execs may not have known the capacitors would explode and leak, but they sure knew that they didn't care. 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. I know there were reports of people not having problems, but you can't launch a new jetliner based on scattered reports of them not crashing on takeoff... and you shouldn't do that with software, either.

As for not using exploits... it wasn't like I tried to. The typical AI diplomacy routines, like those in Civ 3, demanded strictly unequal trades. But if you used the new feature, the "What will make this deal work?" button, the AI would accept any deal you had put on the table, even if they had rejected it before. And they would never accept my peace settlements otherwise, no matter how badly they were losing in a war, or how little I asked for.


As I said earlier, GC2 is in much better shape. No major graphical flaws, working music, no crashes, no slowdown after 10 straight hours DESPITE defragging my other harddrive for the first 4 hours of it. They simply care more... though not *quite* enough for me.

[Fyron]

I'm just glad I borrowed a friend's copy of Civ 4 to try it before wasting any money on a beta...

[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.

[Fyron]

Borrowing a game from a friend (where he does not make a CD image to keep playing it while you have the CD) is totally within the realm of fair use. I only respond to this because this bizarre assumption of piracy from left field might lead others to believe that it is not. Without a demo, there is no other way to test a game on your machine to see if it will run. You can't return opened games to stores these days (at least in California), since everyone that wants to return software is a dirty pirate.

[Sivran]

I dislike it when people make ridiculous claims like

one crash every two hours is extremely low for any kind of game.

Listen to yourself! Or rather, read. Can you not see just how ridiculous this statement is? That's a candidate for Sivran's Most Ridiculous Item of the Day, AFTER I spent an entire day listening to novice computer users describe their problems to me!

I suppose you're also going to say that Windows 9x/ME could not possibly function for more than twenty-four hours at a time, and that spyware "just happens," and that deleting your browser cache is actually useful in more than a small handful of situations?