Campaign Map Hard Freeze

[pfcwintergreen]

After not playing for months, I gave the game another crack when I heard 1.5 came out. Unfortunately, I've been experiencing hard freezes on the campaign map after playing through 10 or so turns. By hard freeze I mean my entire system freezes and becomes completely inoperable; I cannot ctrl-alt-delete out...and the only recourse is to cut my computer's power. Anyone else had this issue?

I'm running Vista 64 with a Phenom Quad Core @ 2.6ghz, a Geforce GTX 260 with 896 megs of video ram, and 4 gigs of system ram. No overclocks. I haven't modded the game. I've tried the latest NVIDIA drivers, and I've tried old NVIDIA drivers. I've tried running in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode as well. I've also tried adjusting the various video settings, as well as switching resolutions.

My system temps are good...other resource intensive games work solidly. No major system crashes besides Empire.

Anyone have a clue about what's going wrong here?

[Boohugh]

If it's locking up your entire computer it sounds like a hardware issue (E:TW is probably just the catalyst for causing the problem to surface). Overheating hardware is the most likely cause, although you say the temps are normal (does that include the graphics card and RAM?). You have some fairly beefy system specs there so the other issue could be your power supply not being good enough. You may not get the problem in other games but Empire is more demanding than most, even compared with other new games.

On second thought, do you have Windows Error Reporting enabled? Ironically that can cause issues when a game crashes if it can't generate the report properly (hogs system resources trying to do it which just locks up the PC). Try turning that off (you'll have to google how, I can't remember off the top of my head) and see if it crashes to desktop properly, then we'll have more idea whether it really is the game or a hardware issue .

[pfcwintergreen]

Thanks for the response.

In regards to low temps, that does include my graphics card. As far as ram...I don't believe I have a sensor there so there is no way of knowing precisely.

This is my power supply http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817152035. Its 630 watts...I should hope that's enough, but I guess they keep upping the ante.

I tried disabling the Windows Error Reporting service...good idea. unfortunately no luck. I still get the same hard freeze every time.

It could be hardware I suppose, but I'm skeptical. This system has been rock solid for almost a year now....and I've challenged it. More importantly, I ran Empire when it came out without it ever hard freezing.

Also here's another anecdote; temporarily, in the past, I have oc'd this system. I bumped up the ram, the ram voltage, the cpu and the motherboard voltage and it ran like an absolute champ...even running Crysis maxed out for hours on end. No hard crashing whatsoever. This indicates to me that when running without any oc's whatsoever, as I am now, my system should be rock solid.

[pfcwintergreen]

An update..not that anyone necessarily cares; I reinstalled the game and it still hard freezes, sort of; the silver lining is that now it freezes and automatically drops back to the bios screens and restarts my system. I don't have to cut the power anymore. When I get back into windows, I get a little crash report from Vista. It looks like this:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 50
BCP1: FFFFFA6008C79000
BCP2: 0000000000000001
BCP3: FFFFFA6006862552
BCP4: 0000000000000000
OS Version: 6_0_6001
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 768_1

Files that help describe the problem:
C:\Windows\Minidump\Mini110609-01.dmp
C:\Users\pfcwintergreen\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-38579-0.sysdata.xml
C:\Users\pfcwintergreen\AppData\Local\Temp\WERC264 .tmp.version.txt

[Fisherking]

Welcome aboard pfcwintergreen.

I am sorry that you have such a serious problem.

To try and help you out, I am going to move this thread down to the Apothecary where you may get more in-depth attention, but I will leave a tag here so it can be followed.

[Boohugh]

Did a search on the Mircrosoft Knowledge Base and found someone with a similar problem. The person that replied to this thread seems to think it's a RAM problem and suggests running the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool. Full instructions on how are contained in the thread. It may not come up with anything but at least it'll remove another possibility.

Let us know how it goes .

[pfcwintergreen]

Good idea Boohugh. Tried the mem test; no errors were found.

However, I think I found the solution to the problem myself; I found another forum where someone had posted the same issue; he claimed that only reverting to the the 181.22 Nvidia drivers could solve the problem. I had tried older drivers before, but reverting to this particular set of drivers seems to have solved the problem for me entirely!

So it would seem that the fault lies in the game's coding itself...or perhaps in the drivers, rather than in my hardware. The game is now running flawlessly with the 181.22 drivers. The person who posted this solution was also using an Nvidia GTX 260...probably not a coincidence. This game and/or Nvidia's drivers must have issues with this graphics card...but I'm leaning towards CA being at fault due to the fact that my pc eats other games for breakfast.

Kind of sucks that I have to run year old drivers if I ever want to play Empire. Oh well.

[Boohugh]

Glad to hear you got it sorted

I imagine it's a problem with both Nvidia's drivers and CA coding (they are probably blaming each other so nobody actually fixes it too ) as there were numerous problems early on with a range of Nvidia cards and recent driver versions.