Must be your pc mate, the only bugs I've seen in the game are the Thalans

I agree with Steve.

i think he is complaining of the loading screen thinking the game has crashed. I must agree that the loading screen or saving takes a long time .. around 3 min for huge and 5 min for gigantic on the first load of the game or first save of a new game. just wait for it to load or save. after the first hurdle is done, saving is pretty quick. other than that, gc2 works perfectly fine with me ( and my comps 3 years old ugh)

Just make sure that you are using the 1.1 patch as that seems to have resolved most of the crashing problems. But then again that patch seems to have caused a memory problem for many people.

As pointed out elsewhere most of the crashes are due to,

1) Running out of RAM.
V1.0 was only stable after I increased the swap file to a insanely large 2GB.

2) Bad video card device drivers.
Which is a problem common to all 3D software.


On the other hand Stardock are also at fault for

A) Not following standard coding practice and checking return codes from memory allocations and then doing a graceful exit when RAM is low.

Not optimising the code to use less RAM. ~1.5GB is clearly too much for what it is doing.

C) Not detecting known bad hardware and device driver versions and then warning the user.


Having had the V1.1 crash a couple of times today, I am sure there are still a few bugs in it. I am getting an Access Violation 0x004163d2, mid turn. You might all like to blame my PC and pretend it is my stupidity that somehow caused the crash. But I know my machine is stable and I know the crash address 0x004163d2 is in the GalGiv2 code. (addresses 0x004163d2 - 0x007A0000 are GalGiv2.exe).

On the other hand, if you get the O/S crashing or a total machine lock up, then it is much more likely that the problem is your video card or low RAM.

My copy has not crashed once, It must be your machine,

I had soms crash-problems on the demo, updated to latest omega-drivers when I bought the game and it hasn't crahsed even once. I don't even experience the problems with saving games, doesn't take more then 10-20sec. here. I run P4 2.8ghz with 1Gb memory and an ati 9600 pro graphics card... nothing fancy really and it works.

C) Not detecting known bad hardware and device driver versions and then warning the user.

As vandenburg said, it comes up with a warning. The problem is, after so many EULA's, and other jack microsoft put up, very few people bother reading anything.

The most common 1.0 crash is overheating. Update the game, and if it still crashes a load, it's your fault. The game NEVER crashed me 1.0, I had one crash on 1.0x (Which I minimised the screen, left it for half an hour, then tried to reload the screen, while I was zoomed right in), and roughly one every 8 hours in the beta's. Still haven't hit a 1.1 crash, so your machine must be terrible.

And passmark, you obviously know little about how Stardock work. They supported galciv1 for a loooooong time. And yes, it's his machine as the game is wonderfully stable. You said yourself about hardware. Err... yes, that's what we mean. It's his hardware, not the game. The fact is, this was made to run on low end machines. If he put up a debug.err we could see the problem, but all he's doing is complaining without a shred of proof of anything.

I have to agree that if the entire machine reboots, Citizen Cotton probably has a buggy device driver or hardware issue.

Here are some links showing my latest crash.

Screen shot 1: Link
Screen shot 2: Link
Crash Dump: Link
VM load addresses: Link

First off its not my computer its my friends and his comp is well above all the specs, it wuns WoW just fine. Its not his machine, its not out of date drivers, its not conflicting drivers, not out of date Galactic Civ 2. Its called crappy programing by stardock and for any of you to say that you havent crashed once since the new patch is an out and out lie, not with me and so many other people having similar crash problems. No its not the long loading screen, although it has crashed while loading too, as well as rebooting the O/S and just an ol fashoned crashing with an option to submit an error to microsoft. If so many other more demanding programs run( (talkin Oblivion and WoW) without nearly as many problems as this one its obvious that poor programing on stardock is the reason. Anyway, I wasnt gana check this post at all but I decided to check it for a hoot and I might do it again, thx for makin me have a good laugh silpheed Steve262626, Galacticus Chibi Neko and anyone I forgot. Mabye stardock runs great on a Dell or a Gateway some n00b computer like that but not a real computer.

Cotton: If your friend is having troubles, make sure they come on this forum and we'll try to help him get the issues resolved. We've been talking to several development studios reciently, and the unfortunate truth is that ALL pc games, no matter how well they're tested on different machines, will have problems working on about 2% of the users machines. Your friend was lucky with those other games, but is having an unforseen problem with ours.

Again, let him know that he's welcome to get assistance getting the game running on his computer.

PassMark: Thanks for the Exception log. We'll look into your crashes ASAP.

If so many other more demanding programs run( (talkin Oblivion and WoW) without nearly as many problems as this one its obvious that poor programing on stardock is the reason.

It's funny reading that because once upon a time I felt exactly the same. Although tbh I invested a little more effort into trying to find out what the problem was and not quite as much complaining rudely. "How on earth could GalCiv2 be crashing every 2-3 minutes (and so severely... The whole system would crash causing a reboot most of the time) when games like BF2 and WoW run fine for hours", I would ask myself. Long story short... 15 bucks, a can of compressed air and a bit of feeling like an idiot later and my problems were gone. Imagine how I felt when over a month worth of minor computer problems turned out to be something as simple as dust on the heatsink and fans. GalCiv2 hasn't crashed once since the cleaning.

Just for the record I don't have a 'n00b' Dell or Gateway.. my system is 100% built by me. All aluminium coolermaster case with 4 80mm fans and a heavy duty CPU fan and heatsink, it's not the best but it's far from the worst. If GalCiv2 can overheat my stuff I'm sure most other people are suseptible. Might be worth checking out...