4Players.de Das Spielemagazin. Kritisch. Ehrlich. Aktuell.

Download-Beschreibung

v1.52 is a major upgrade to Civ IV and includes numerous optimizations for memory usage that should help performance on all machines but are tailored to especially improve performance on machines at or near the minimum specification.

Major changes include:

• Shared low-level graphics buffers
• Removed many unused fonts and reduced interface memory usgae
• Paged out units which are not visible
• Reduced terrain data size and overhead
• Reduced route data size
• Created a set of low-res movies for machines without dynamic texture support (this is a separate download)
• These changes not only reduced the amount of system memory required, but lowered video memory usage extensively.  Also, the rate at which the game consumes memory in the late-game has decreased, which is extremely important.
• In addition, a new config file (ini) option called 'MemorySaver' has been added for further memory reduction, at the cost of alt-tabbing support.  If you set MemorySaver=1 in the config file, you can lower your system memory usage by 70% of video memory.  So if you have a 128MB video card, you can save an additional ~90MB of system memory.  MemorySaver defaults to off, and is not officially recommended since it doesn't handle alt-tabbing and other cases of graphics device loss at this time.  However, we recognize that some users may want to experiment with it.
• Finally, the use of unofficial patches is not recommended and is largely redundant with the memory fixes in this patch.  Unofficial patches may slow performance, cause graphical problems or conflict with Firaxis code resulting in crashes or other problems.  It also makes it more difficult for us to respond to error reports and debug issues reported by users running unauthorized patches.

Suggestions for optimal performance:

• Increase AGP memory size in your BIOS settings to 128 or 256 if necessary.
• Go to www.windowsupdate.com and apply updates
• Update graphics and sound drivers
• Close other background applications
• Turn graphics to low and use low-resolution textures in the options screen
• Turn off Antialiasing in your display properties
• Disable virus protection 

Changes:

• Tech cost rebalancing
• Improved city attack AI
• Moved MaxAutosaves to ini file
• Slower Great People name generation
• Hide health bars during combat
• Increased late-game tech costs
• Waypoints now invisible when city screen is up
• AI more willing to trade cities for peace
• AI stays at war longer
• Cottages no longer grow during anarchy
• Combat info now shows odds of success
• WBS's now contain unit damage
• Score from land doesn't count until you own land for 20 turns
• Better invasion AI
• Slavery: No Upkeep
• Emancipation: Low Upkeep
• Tweaked AI civic values
• Filled in missing diplo entries for Frederick
• Praetorians: 40->45 hammers
• Jaguars: 40->35 hammers
• AI turn optimizations
• Interface game messages are now flushed at end of turn
• Environmentalism moved to Medicine
• Increased industrial era tech costs
• Environmentalism is medium upkeep
• Free Speech is low upkeep
• Forests give 0.5 health
• Firepower in combat now based on max strength
• Lobby sorting improvements
• Clearing the table in the MP diplomacy screen resets the "They accept/They do not accept" text
• Dawn of man screen closes with ESCAPE just like all the other interface screens
• The hall of fame now shows only games that have been played with the currently-loaded mod
• When trying to build an item that it not allowed in a city, you will get a production popup asking for a build instead of leaving production empty
• Wonder Movies and other popups may appear in PBEM/Hotseat
• Incremented save version to 102
• Simplified city billboard placement.  This should fix the weird billboard offsets and scaling.

Additions:

• Lobby chat and buddy lists from staging rooms
• Combat odds now shown in combat turn log
• ALT-S now allows you to place signs
• Added "Leave Forest" option for automated workers
• Added Marathon game speed (longer than Epic)
• Added NoTechSplash ini setting
• More communication about autopatch failures
• Domestic advisor remembers which cities you had selected last time screen was up.
• Added "no cheating" game option for single-player
• In addition to tradeable techs, techs that are not allowed to be traded to you are also shown, provided that you can research them yourself at the moment
• Added event and replay messages when a human founds a city. This got broken when we added city renaming
• Support for Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
• When you zoom to a city from the domestic advisor, you return to the domestic advisor after you exit the city screen
• Updated Info Screen with changes 'borrowed' from one of the forum modders

Fixes:

• Unit attack move bug
• Civ naming bug in sp
• No longer keep your gold and techs when regenerating a map
• Missing civic name from popup help
• Minimap now appears correctly after regenerating map
• Unit cycling bug
• Load game freeze bug
• Movement freeze bug in si-move
• Unit cycling bug in PitBoss and HotSeat
• Missing plot list buttons bug with large stacks
• Pathfinding bug involving defensive terrain and group movement
• Bug with AI attacking over rivers
• Can no longer see spies on caravels
• Group attack bug
• Group attack bug with gunships
• GS lobby ignoring game settings bug
• Disappearing popup help bug
• Diplo city trading bug
• Wonder movie/zoom to building crash
• No camera adjustment to city screen bug
• User profiles with build queues no longer crash
• No more negative gold in diplo screen
• Fixed gifting bad cities to AI exploit
• AI issues with Always War and Always Peace
• Units not moving into tiles after combat bug (graphical only)
• Pathfinding reuse fix
• Fixed pathfinding bug
• Fixed SHIFT-selecting multiple cities
• End score not matching up with timed winner bug
• Fixed bug allowing selection of disabled techs in tech chooser
• Fixed Sentry promotion visiblity bug
• Fixed AI city targeting bug
• Fixed AI healing bug
• AI city attack bug
• No more message lag in single-player
• Fixed bug with gunship stacks attacking cities
• Random seed bug (causing duplicate world maps...)
• Unit health bars no longer show up in city screen
• Two-palaces-from-culture-flipping-capital bug
• Foreign Advisor: Gold available for trade does not show up when there cannot be a trade for gold
• Diplomacy screen fix for gold popups not appearing properly
• Foreign advisor: Resources for active player are shown multiple times if you have more than one instance of a resource to trade.
• Fixed weird little bug with Unit Categories page in Civilopedia
• Diplomacy bug for PBEM/Hotsesat
• Removed some cheats from password-protected games that should not have been allowed in the first place
• Fix for competitive games: Password-protected saves can no longer be easily stripped of their passwords, and the assets checksum in the save can no longer be modified by external means
• Fixed vanishing yield symbols in multiplayer
• Fixed some PBEM/Hotseat issues when there is just one human player
• River and Wind sounds are now properly classified as ambience. This fixes inconsistent behavior in audio options
• Minimized or No Interface no longer reverts to normal after entering, then exiting city view
• You can no longer duplicate deals with the AI from the "Active deals" section of the diplomacy screen
• Out of memory message problem on machines that don't allocate small textures properly
• Assert error for software vertex processing only machines
• Bug where you could draw strategy lines and signs outside of globe view 
• "globe view buildings disabled" option now hides buildings in globe view properly