I’m a huge Civ fan, and I think I’ve been fairly vocal about that. I waited vigilantly for Civilization IV, pre-ordered it, and purchased it on day one. What I got was an incomplete product. The discs are mislabelled (disc one, which is the play disc, is labelled as the “Install Disc,” and disc two, the disc used only to finish installation, is marked as the “Play Disc”), the tech tree that comes with the game was in French (though Take-Two says they’ll send me an English one for free), and the game constantly crashes to the desktop. I’ll be about 3000 years into a game when it’ll just randomly close itself in the middle of a turn. When I get closer to 1500AD - 2000 AD, the game starts crashing every turn, sometimes before I can even finish giving my instructions for the turn.
That, however, was apparantly just the problems I’ve been having. There were apparantly some compatibility issues with ATI cards (which I fortunately didn’t suffer), amongst other issues.
Grah, this is infuriating. I just want to play my game. I know there’s a few other Civ fans here, are you guys having these problems?
All I can say is, they’re releasing a patch sometime soon.
I have that crashing problem later on in the game as well, though not so frequent.
I had no problems with the “discs” nor the language of the game.
They did botch the release, but they seem to be working hard to remedy it. Free tech tree replacements, and a patch only a couple weeks after the games launch are signs of diligence on the devs parts.
I, for one, have not suffered many of these issues. However, some friends I played multi with do suffer it, so I know they are there.
I haven’t seen a patch yet, nor have I seen any updates on their website implying that one’s coming. If a patch arrives, and it fixes the problem, then I’ll be happier, but until then, I’m pretty upset.
Fear not Saturn, the patch will be released this week. This was annouced at Civfanatics, which if you notice on their offical site, they list it as one of two offical message boards. I for one am having fun with the game, even so the only problems I have are stupid shadow lines coming out of a random unit type (swordman get this a lot).
They’re working on it. It’s a problem thay usually happen with all games that are greatly awaited: They’re usually rushed towards the end to meet the deadline and as a result are bugged and unstable. It happened with Master of Orion III, Age of Empires III and it’s happened with Civilization IV.
In my experience, games that are ‘great but incomplete’ have had the tendency to be regarded as classics many years after their release… starting a few months AFTER said release. And as a person who has sufferred few bugs (I can alt-tab safely for some reason, unlike everyone else, and my 2 gigs of RAM counters the memory leak very well), I have to say that this may very well be Sid’s best game yet. Our patience will pay off.
I’ve got plenty of RAM (2GB on the laptop, 1.25GB on the desktop), but still the problem. I wasn’t aware that AoE3 had some bugs as well. I’m kind of glad that I held off on buying it for now.
Large RAM will counter the memory leak, not the random crashes to desktop. Memory leak means slowdown after some time, not an outright crash.
Oh, one other bug I encountered was more amusing than anything; the broken HTML coding in the ‘player has dropped, vote for what you do’ screen’s chat box.
Well, it’s more serious lacks than bugs, really. You garrision military units anymore and there’s no formations and you can’t set your unit to patrol or stand ground. You’ve got to bloody babysit them.
Funny thing is, My computer doesn’t even meet the min. requirements, but I don’t have many of these problems. I do have an annoying problem with the Fog of War, but it’s never crashed to desktop.
Im theorizing the buyout may have caused enough of a stirrup at the offices to delay the patch.
I’m beginning to feel for you. A multiplayer game me and some friends had going was shaping up to be awesome, but then Out of Sync errors started happening indefinately after a few turns, when we tried resuming from a break.