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Owl

Owl

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I think I've correctly downloaded all the patches but I'm still getting regular game crashes - typically when there's a lot going on including troop movements, colonisation and/or battles. One moment I'm wiping the floor with the French and sending the reserves out to burn all their trading posts, and the next I'm back at the desktop without so much as an error message.
Is this a common problem, or just me?
 
It is a common problem, I get it every now and then. My last one was while sending 5 armies from a siege in one province to another province, as soon as I right-clicked on the destination I CTD. This was repeatable. I got around it by sending one army, then the other 4.

People generally report that the slower you run the game the less CTD you have, so try that when it starts to happen frequently.
 
I think that that's most likely true, because I play the game on the second or third slowest speed setting, and have only ever had one crash to the desktop (in the middle of a war today :mad: )
 
Care to give a bit more information, like what specs your pc has, what system do you use etc? Sometimes just defragging helps.

And strangely, i have had only a few crashes...
 
Originally posted by AndrewT
It is a common problem, I get it every now and then. My last one was while sending 5 armies from a siege in one province to another province, as soon as I right-clicked on the destination I CTD. This was repeatable. I got around it by sending one army, then the other 4.

People generally report that the slower you run the game the less CTD you have, so try that when it starts to happen frequently.
Click to expand...

Thanks all - I've also now seen a separate correspondence on this under "Support".
Running the game slower DOES help.
The PC is reasonably up to date, 500mhz Pentium 3, 128mb RAM - not a Ferrari but I thought it should be ample. Defragging made no difference.
Come to think of it, I tend to attack countries when they're already absorbed in a war with someone else, so it seems that the computer is just being asked to spin too many plates at once.
 
The PC is reasonably up to date, 500mhz Pentium 3, 128mb RAM
Click to expand...

This was the same spec as my system (PIII 800MHz - 128 Mb RAM). The crashes got worse as the game went along and the numbers of troops increased. I upped the 128 Mb RAM to 256 Mb and haven't crashed since. I have played through two complete games since increasing the memory and before that could never have gotten through a game without multiple crashes. Don't belive the minimum requirements on the box.
 
The longer you play at a sitting, the more prone the game is to crashes, due to a known memory-leak problem (windows isn't spectacularly good with keeping memory intact anyway, and a game on this scale makes it worse.) Saving, rebooting and reloading at intervals will help solve this problem, but then you hit "historical monarch-related events won't happen after a reload."

All you can really do is make sure your PC is clean and defragged, reboot before starting play, with as few programs running as possible, and reboot again, after playing, to your normal background setup.
 
There is a program you can get called MemTurbo which can be used to recover RAM that isn't being used by your PC. Often, you will have less RAM left than you should, because your computer won't recover all of the RAM it used to perform earlier operations. While I've never had many EU crashes (only one, in fact, as I said earlier), I've had DSL problems, and was able to fix them when I got MemTurbo because, I discovered, the problems occured when my computer was running low on RAM. I was able to fix the problems by just making sure that my RAM stayed above a certain level (the program monitors the amount of free RAM you have available).
 
RAM leakage

Thanks again. This RAM leakage concept is a new one for me, but then I'm a relic from an era where computers occupied whole rooms and tended to explode at the end of this week's episode ... yes we're talking Dr Who /Man From UNCLE ...
but it makes sense. So if another member of the family has just spent two hours online with Tribes 2 I'd better re-boot before playing.
 
The latest patch was supposed to fix the mem-leak problem. At least that's what it claims to do. I still get crashes as well. (700mhz Dell PC with 256 mem). I've noticed that it is always when I am selecting something with the mouse. Also often in the diplomacy menu.
 
I've actually a game with France in 1682 (IGC2.2). I'm at war versus Turkey, Spain, Persia and some minors and crashes appear every twenty to thirty minutes.
It's boring...

I wait the patch 1.11, but none information about it from 11-05-2001 by Patric in the update section...
 
Paradox take note

It seems that the crashes to desktop are so common as to represent a major flaw in the game design. There are stories about the problem in several forums (fora?) and lots of suggested solutions that don't work for anyone else.

This is really not good enough. What are Paradox doing about it?
 
Re: Paradox take note

Originally posted by Owl
It seems that the crashes to desktop are so common as to represent a major flaw in the game design.
This is really not good enough. What are Paradox doing about it?
Click to expand...

It is NOT a flaw in game design - if it were, they'd affect everybody.
 
Hmmm...when is it a flaw? When it's 25% of the people? Pretty much if it's your PC that's crashing, it's a flaw. =)

I have played many games on my PC and have dozens of other programs. EU is the ONLY one that does this. That makes it an EU problem.
 
Trust me on this, it's a PC flaw. PC's, as I said earlier, aren't good at retaining their RAM, so if you play for too long, or if you've just been doing something else, they run low on RAM and the game crashes.
 
Originally posted by Michael James
Hmmm...when is it a flaw? When it's 25% of the people?
Click to expand...


I'll repeat myself - if it were a game flaw, then it would affect EVERYBODY. A broken machine is broken no matter who tries to use it. Since there is at least one person (me) who almost never suffers a crash, then it is NOT a game flaw - it's a PC problem.
 
The only time I have ever had a crash (after the Dip bug was eradicated) was when clicking on a History button. I understand that this is going to be fixed.
 
While I agree with the general opinion that EU crashes are Windows problems, there is at least one EU problem (since I've experienced it repeatedly):

If you have more than one army on a fleet, and unload them, moving them into an enemy fortified province. If one of those armies is not large enough to enter the province due to the fortification level of the province, a crash will occur. Note, this depends on army composition. If an army can get established in the province before the "too small" army arrives, no crash will occur.

I don't know whether a similar thing would happen if you multiple select armies and move them to an adjacent province to besiege. A prior post implied a similar circumstance causing a crash.
 
I still call it a flaw

Take a look around the message forums Heyesey - there is a very large number of people who are getting crashes on a regular basis.
I don't get the logic of saying that "It's OK on my machine so it's not an EU problem". If Windows 2000 caused crashes in say 25% of users' machines Microsoft would be in deep shit and finding one guy who hadn't yet experienced the problem would not help them much. I'm sure it's worse for some machines / configurations than others and I can see that there are things you can do (like slowing down game speed) that make it happen less often - but it's there.
It's a major weakness in an otherwise superb game and I'd like to hear what Paradox have to say on it.
 
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