So many bugs

LOEL!!! hai guyz i totalley agree with u OMG



You are a goose of the highest order. I don't know how the Stardock people sleep at night knowing that people like you are free to play their game.

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

Yeah, GC2 hard-crashes forcing a restart.... .... when, again? I've owned the game since it came out, and I've had my share of crashes... but it's never taken the OS down - I've never had to restart. BUTZOR THE TEH TERRIBLE REVIEWS AND CRASHING!!!!!!!!!1111111ONEeleven

I agree with Steve.

Hillarious, it had some problems on release version but nothing serious, most certainly never a hard crash for me. v1.1 well it has been running constant for 3 days. (I forgot to quit the game when i was leaving for a trip) Me nor other 5 ppl i know to have this game have not had a single crash since v1.1 came out.

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)

GC2 has never crashed on my machine.

It does have an annoyingly large number of gameplay bugs, but it seems very stable.

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.

The savegame loading does take aaaaaages now.

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.

Install Smart Exception from SDC and send the resulting dump file to support.

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

Already sent the dump.

The, "It must be your machine", comments are naive, ignorant & make it obvious you have no concept of how software is developed.

There is a vast array of PC hardware on the market, so it is now extremely difficult for software developers to ensure their software works on the majority of hardware.

GC2 is also a complex game. With each game being different from the last. Meaning that the execution path through the code varies from one game to the next. Thus exposing some people to bugs not seen by others.

I predict there will be several more rounds of patches yet to come for GC2. This of course assumes Stardock continue to support the game and don't abandon it & move on to a new project. No sign they are going to do this at the moment however.

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.

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.

You've read their code? Wow, I also want to do it. Where can I have a look at it?

Btw. as stated in this forum by Stardock people, the game shouldn't use more then 500MB of RAM, but there is a bug somewhere that causes the use of more

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

The game does this already. But it seems that peole are unable to read those messages..


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As for the original poster. Has anyone here have heard of reviews that spoke of lots of crashes? I haven't heard of them. Oh well, anyway. I hadn't a hard crash, so, the game can't be that bad, you know.

(Since my configuration and hardware on my old pc just sucks. Old drivers everywhere, a registry which is probably larger then my windows directory, etc. )

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.

If you are crashing so hard that you have to restart Windows, then you have a serious problem with your machine. This is the first and only thread I have ever seen about GC2 crashing this badly. Perhaps you need a professional to give your system a serious overhaul. I know this guy at my college who has so much crap on his computer, nobody can make heads or tails of any problem he has because there is so much conflicting garbage on his system. Maybe you need a good registry cleanup and defrag, or perhaps even a complete reformat with the latest BIOSes for your motherboard and video, system drivers, audio and video drivers, DirectX, etc.

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

Just cause it hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, i.e. one of two ppl, doesnt mean it isn't happening to the rest of us with comps well above the minimum system requirements.

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.

For me its not hard to see why Cottons OS restarts - when the maps get cluttered on Galciv II its processor and memory requirements are huge (with v1.0 at least).. If the cpu load is high then the increased heat may force a restart.
I have a similar experience although not as bad. I can play oblivion or Battlefield 2 with max settings and AA/AF or HDR and I never experience bad frame rates or 1 single crash in hours of play (my pc is quite modern). Yet Galciv II does occasionally slow down and crash but only when theres a LOT going on. This doesnt bother me and im sure that future patches will fix the problems. I would suggest to Cotton not to worry about his pc though as its hard to see how Galciv II has a more complex code than Oblivion and BF2.
People commenting 'it works fine on mine it must be your pc' is not really constructive

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.

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.

The specs for my rig (which was built by myself not Dell or Gateway)
AMD 3200 x64
2gig Kingston HyperX
Sapphire Radeon X1600xt 256mb
SB Audigy 2 Zs

Have had no crashes as yet in 1.1, had 2 or 3 pre 1.1

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...

This game has crashed on me loads, now where have my medals gone since i updated to 1.1?

Ah! There they r! Now fingers crossed i have sorted all the crashes/bugs/glitchs/annoyances out (only took 2-3 hrs, gnash of teeth).