I just played the funniest game of Civ 4 ever. I’m checking out the Rise of Mankind mod, trying to get familiar with the new tech tree, buildings, wonders, and all that, so I thought I’d play an OCC at cheiftan level. The idea was to play a purely builder game, leaving the AIs alone, and win a scientific victory.
I noted that as I was racing up the tech tree, the AIs weren’t going anywhere. Sure, that’s to be expected at cheiftan, for a while; eventually they’ll grow large enough that their science should start getting better. But that wasn’t happening. When I was researching things like Assembly Line and Electricity, most of the AIs were still working on techs such as Pottery or The Wheel. Cyrus was the exception; he managed to have 13 or 14 cities at his height, and he made it somewhere into the middle ages.
I finally figured out what was going on, when I noticed large numbers of AI cities falling to barbarians. For some reason the barbs were out of control, and the AIs were fighting for their very survival (I was sporting the Great Wall, so the barbs couldn’t touch me). They all had all of their sliders set at 0%, with their economies in the red and their armies on strike.
Then I noticed a large empty space in the mini-map, and entire civs were being snuffed out. By the time it was down to just Cyrus, Hannibal and I, I realized I should start taking some screen shots.
Is this barbarian rampage a problem with the mod, then? I was theorizing that since I was so far ahead in tech, it was throwing off the tech level of the barb units, making them too advanced for the AI civs, then once they started taking cities they were multiplying like rabbits.
Perhaps not, though. Now that I think about it, I noted their numbers were too much even at the beginning of the game, before I had the Great Wall up - I’ve played normal games with “Raging Barbs” checked that didn’t have as many of them running around as in this game, where that option was not checked.
That mod, while one of the most lovingly crafted and detailed Civ IV mods available, always crashes sometime before AD 1. It suffers from feature bloat, where the makers keep adding new features with each patch without bothering to squash old bugs and ensure gameplay is balanced.
This works, and despite John DiFool it’s stable, unfortunately no matter what size of map you play on the tech crawls to ant speed around the early 20th century tech and I’ve never developed passed motorcycles before giving up just winning a conquest victory. With all the additions (Rev, Barb minor civs etc.) your processor will get bogged down with a memory leak and the turns take longer and longer.
I’ve found saving & restarting fixes the turns taking longer and longer issue. But, especially if there’s a lot of CPUs and it’s late in the game, it will start happening again in about 15-20 turns.
It’s a pity. If they could fix the slowdown issue the mod would be quite fun.
The new resources can be quite interesting. I played one Pangaea game where there was only one of the resource that’s required for gunpowder(can’t recall what it is) and it was in my opponents territory. So I had to ferry some troops around back and start a surprise war to control the are before the enemy teched high enough to use it.
The memory leak has been around since day one, and with the myriad patches Firaxis has released this issue has never been addressed. This has been a major gripe of mine for the past five years. In the unmodded game the leak only becomes an issue if the game runs for hours on end on a huge map, but it’s there; as Spectralist says, quitting and restarting the game solves the problem - for a while.
I’ve been afraid this problem would be magnified with this mod, since there’s so much more to it… I was hoping if I played standard maps rather than huge it might not be so bad. Sigh… maybe it’s just not worth it. Huge maps are the most fun anyway.
Are there any other good mods out there that expand on the game like RoM, but maybe without the overkill?
Then despite different signifiers (you say “memory leak” I say “unstable”) we are likely talking about the same thing. Point remains that this is a hugely ambitious mod which overreached itself-damned shame as, for one, I like having more resources to trade (even if trade doesn’t have as significant effect on your economy as you’d think it would, historically-speaking, but that’s the core engine I’m talking about).
