I followed all of Steam's troubleshooting plans; uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times; I've rebooted as well. It only happens with GC III. I loaded two other games from Steam after this error started. It stops around the time 300 MB gets downloaded.
I don't know if anyone else is having the issue.
I lost my drive recently and this is a fresh install.
Whitelist Steam and GC3 with your anti-virus, it is stopping the game from downloading the manual.
I made the file an exception, specifically gave it the "allow" through the firewall and past the virus checker -- no go. Between my last Windows, drive, game and viral updates it doesn't want to play. Even turned off my incoming virus scan to see if that would work. The manual still hangs up.
I'll look into Whitelisting, but that seems to be run through the dev's website and has forms. It may take a few days to clear the time and it won't be an instant fix.
For now I'll just go back to II and wait for IV.
Shame, after a really difficult start up it had become my favorite 4X. Often opened it just to play with the ship designer.
Thanks for the information about the cause.
What anti-virus do you use?
Avast
And you have tried this method to exclude files?
Yes for the specific file. It didn't change anything.
I've tried on a variety of levels from just the file name to the entire Steam pathway.
Have you tried making an exception to the Steam.exe? It is the program that downloads the file.
Yep. Steam.exe -- called by the title Steam Client Bootstrapper -- is on the exclusion list since before this issue.
Did I mention it was only GalCiv -- both 2 and 3, by the way -- that is having the issue. So....
Could you guys hurry 4 along for me. I'd appreciate that.
I got it downloaded -- by clicking the DL arrow every time it kicked back the write to disk error. The problem started at around 285 - 300 MB and after I punched it all the way to a bit past 500 MB, it took over and finished the DL.
I scanned the GalCiv folder and a couple of the files in it and a couple of sub folders and there isn't any viruses flagged.
It all seems in working order.
Still, I wish I could figure out what the issue is. It's going to bug me for a bit... although I don't think I'm going to uninstall, so I can try again.
Thanks for your help, and if I do figure it out I'll let you know.
It's a false positive, the game's manual is large so an anti-virus might think there is something suspicious about it.
I'll send it to Avast and get them to whitelist it.
I really appreciate you trying to help with this.
Well the problem with firewalls is you pay me money or you will be blacklisted. It has nonething to do with if the program is good or not, but are you willing to pay me money. Causing a lot of people to not use firewalls. Leaving computers vulnerable.
I never thought I would ever say this, but MS Defender's Firewall is user friendly compared to some. But as you say, since the firewall came with the Avast package it is pretty much the one the rest of the package works best with.
Can't live without them though. and this one's caught stuff. So I'll fight with its foibles and complain when I have trouble with something.
,
I kind of think the user manual should probably be a link to be a separate download. This way, we wouldn't have this issue.
I thought along similar lines. I imagine it would be easier to update as well. The one all the fuss was over has "Intrigue" and "Crusade" on the cover and is dated 2018. Still useful, and I may go back and replay the campaign from Intrigue, but before that a lot of good changes hadn't been made yet.
I too had this problem today. I don't think this is a Stardock problem or anti-virus issue; it's a Steam client issue with something about how one (or more) of their CDNs has stored the PDF file and subsequently corrupted it. (I'm in Ohio, so may not be a problem if you're not hitting East coast/ Midwest Steam servers?)
And like @AChallenge mentions above, I was able to keep clicking "Retry" over and over, getting another MB or two to download (sometimes 7MB at a time) from about 300MB to 660MB until Steam finally got the entire file downloaded and moved on to the rest of the game's files.
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