Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords

What works

Everything (well, 99% anyway)

What does not

All of the problems are just minor graphical bugs that have no real impact on the game.

You can easily play this game and have about 99% of the native game experience.

• When invading a planet, the battlefield (planet's tiles) are completely white, but the rest of the UI work. I found no fix for this one... yet
• The cursor is blinking and laggy. In order to fix this, you have to enable the hardware cursor through the video settings
• The game throws a bunch of errors when launching it, complaining about video/display settings. They can be ignored, the game will run fine anyway
• The fonts are unsmoothed and sometimes a few of them rendered incorrectly (especially the italics or those with a big size). I found no fix for this but this is not a big deal, you can still read everything even the buggy ones
• The background stars are not rendered at all. I found no fix for this either
• The research selection interface is pretty laggy but it's not a big deal. I found no fix, but TBH I didn't even try searching :))

Workarounds

What was not tested

• Multiplayer
• Mods
• Campaign

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Note: I have the Steam version with all the DLCs installed. I launched only the Twillight of the Arnor one. I'm not sure if the others work but most probably they do. IMPORTANT: Because I use Steam, some required things like DirectX or some DLLs might have been already installed. If you have troubles starting the game try checking other test submissions and see what fixes are listed there. I went through them myself and found that most of them were already applied on my prefix, so they might be required. Note: I played it for about 16 hours (so far), on an insane-sized galaxy, abundant planets, habitats, etc... max major+minor races, etc... and I fully enjoyed the game. Also, the game never crashed (except when I acidentally Alt+Tab out of it, but this happens to all Wine apps). It also seemed to be very fast, passing the turns didn't take too long. Once I had an issue with setting the rally points. It was more of a graphical issue actually, as all the landing sites were highlighted (like they were all active at the same time). I had this problem only once, that's why I won't list it in the "not working" section Once (again, only once), when I created a custom race, the input text fields froze and I coduln't write anything. I fixed this by switching to another workspace/desktop and back on the game. One of the UP sessions was really laggy, but this was afer I played the game for several hours.

1.) When does this happen:

This error is thrown when the game used up all the allocated memory (RAM) and there is no more left to complete the game saving process, and results in a crash and possibly corrupted save games.

2.) Why does this happen:

It usually happens on immense galaxies with abundant planets and many races and units on the map at the same time.

Those conditions result in a huge amount of RAM being used. This game is a 32bit game, which means that it can only access a maximum of 2Gb RAM. (So no, this error is not caused by WINE)

3.) How can this be fixed / worked around:

Luckily, there are tools out there to trick 32bit applications into using 4Gb RAM (which is the maximum amount of RAM that a 32bit system can use as a whole). Even more fortunate is the fact that this game works perfectly with this "patch".

The tool can be downloaded here

Just run "wine 4gb_patch.exe {path_to_game_exe}" and that's it. The tool will automatically back up the original executable so there's no need to do that manually.

After that's done (it should be done in an instant) you can run the game just like you normally would.

4.) Possible issues:

If your system has less or exactly 4Gb RAM and your game will somehow use all of them, this might cause problems for your other applications and possibly even for your operating system, because there may not be any more RAM free for anything on your machine.

I'm not sure how Linux (or Mac) reacts when all RAM is used up, but I'd recommend closing all non-essential applications while playing this game with this path, because this game eats through your RAM like there's no tomorrow when you play on big maps.

If your system has more than 4Gb RAM then there shouldn't be any issue at all.