Had my first crash this morning....

[GBS]

It was the total, blue screen, "need to shut down" type crash. I was just attaching units to a leader when it happened. Wish I had used auto save. Until then the game had been quite stable. I have a 3.2 Gig processor, 2 Gigs of RAM and the Radion 9800 series vidio card.

[Grotius]

I had my first crash last night. Playing the first turn of the campaign game, with the AI playing the Union, the game crashed as the Union was making a series of strategic moves. I'm running Vista 64, nVidia 8800 Ultra, 4 G RAM. I'm using the nVidia 169.25 drivers.

[Joel Billings]

Could you guys attach a dxdiag of your systems. Any chance you can repeat these crashes from a save game?

[Grotius]

I just repeated it -- no save game to attach, since my crash to desktop (not a blue screen of death) occurs about two minutes into the grand campaign when I play against the Union AI. Fog of War On, Subcommanders On, map scroll set to 1, most everything else set to default. The crash occurred at the exact same moment. The Union wins in Grafton, navally bombards Norfolk, does some naval movement, and then I see tons of strategic movement -- a ton of land units with blue arrows all over the east and midwest. As this movement starts, I crash to desktop.

My dxdiag is attached.

One possible culprit in my case is that while I'm using a fairly recent Vista64 driver for my nVidia card, from Dec. 2007 (ver. 169.25), I'm not using the most up-to-date driver, which has caused me trouble in other apps. I know you're going to tell me to upgrade that driver, *shivers*.

[Erik Rutins]

Grotius,

FYI, we did test it on Vista 64 with a Dual Core system and a GeForce 8800 GTS and had no issues at all. However, you have a quad core which we did not test and certainly Vista's drivers are pretty buggy. I notice your sound driver is also from January, 2007 - is there a newer one you can try? Our Vista test system had random blue screens in general in all applications until we kept updating drivers and found a recent combination that was stable for all our games, so driver maintenance in Vista is an absolute necessity.

Regards,

- Erik

[Grotius]

Update: I was able to get through the Union/AI's first turn by changing a number of things, but I haven't isolated which one cured the problem. I did the following:

1. Chose XP compatibility mode for the game (right-clicked the game icon's properties, selected compatibility mode).

2. Left the game in windowed mode. My desktop is 1920 x 1200. I didn't hit the full-screen button.

3. Slowed down the animation speed of the AI player.

4. Slowed down the combat-report delays.

I'm going to play on a bit, but if things keep going OK, I'll return to the beginning and try to figure which of the above four things helped.

[Joel Billings]

ORIGINAL: Grotius

Update: I was able to get through the Union/AI's first turn by changing a number of things, but I haven't isolated which one cured the problem. I did the following:

1. Chose XP compatibility mode for the game (right-clicked the game icon's properties, selected compatibility mode).

2. Left the game in windowed mode. My desktop is 1920 x 1200. I didn't hit the full-screen button.

3. Slowed down the animation speed of the AI player.

4. Slowed down the combat-report delays.

I'm going to play on a bit, but if things keep going OK, I'll return to the beginning and try to figure which of the above four things helped.

That's great news, and it would be extremely helpful if you could pin down which of the items seems to be causing the problem.

[Grotius]

Sure, I'll try to do that tomorrow. For now I'm too obsessed with the game I've got going.