[CTDs] kind of sick of it

[Jikot]

>Epic battle with two enemy armies containing about seven or so of their generals.
>Pick off all of their generals early on, routing their armies for my horses to mop up.
>Thousands of their dead (plus all of their generals) against dozens of casualties on my side.
>Battle over, load screen, desktop.

DID NOT COMPUTE PLEASE TRY AGAIN

This happens WAY too regularly, and frankly it's disgusting. It's making me auto 99% of all battles, and even then I go in half-assed knowing all may be undone by another CTD.

Other minor quibbles:

- troops won't pursue enemies fleeing towards their city walls
(sallying enemies flee, send horses to mop up, horses kiss the fleeing enemies' backs and stop dead in their tracks, not killing a single soldier and allowing the fleeing unit containing 5 soldiers to return, flee, return over and over and over until the clock runs out)

- I keep "losing turns" at the most critical of moments
(need army to cover ground quickly, no more moves captain, next turn, still no more moves captain)

- Squalor in cities with all sanitary buildings and a single unit will keep spiralling out of control until ultimately the city rebels (unless you stack the city full of units, enhancing squalor).

Just thought I'd vent.

[AstroCat]

Yes, I think EB is an awesome mod but I am being totally pushed away because of the after battles CTDs. I have tried a lot of things to fix it, including installing on XP instead of Vista which helped some but really I can only hope that one day EBII comes out and it is more stable. For now I'm mostly back to TW:M2 and EUIII for my strategy gaming. I need a break from the CTDs in EB. :(

[bobbin]

>Epic battle with two enemy armies containing about seven or so of their generals.
>Pick off all of their generals early on, routing their armies for my horses to mop up.
>Thousands of their dead (plus all of their generals) against dozens of casualties on my side.
>Battle over, load screen, desktop.

DID NOT COMPUTE PLEASE TRY AGAIN

This happens WAY too regularly, and frankly it's disgusting. It's making me auto 99% of all battles, and even then I go in half-assed knowing all may be undone by another CTD.

This is a memory leak problem of the RTW game, so we can't do anything about it. It appears more commonly on EB because the mod requires a lot more computer power to run.
It is recommended that you wait about 30 seconds at the victory screen before closing it to allow your computer time to recover. It won't completely eliminate the problem but it does help a lot.
Restarting RTW every 2-3 hours of game play is also supposed to help.

Other minor quibbles:

- troops won't pursue enemies fleeing towards their city walls
(sallying enemies flee, send horses to mop up, horses kiss the fleeing enemies' backs and stop dead in their tracks, not killing a single soldier and allowing the fleeing unit containing 5 soldiers to return, flee, return over and over and over until the clock runs out)

Again, a RTW problem so not our fault.

- I keep "losing turns" at the most critical of moments
(need army to cover ground quickly, no more moves captain, next turn, still no more moves captain)

If you use up all the movement points of army with a family member in it they will become exhausted begin to get movement penalties, if a character isn't very energetic he will tire very quickly, use characters with the "vigorous" trait instead.
Finally, marching in winter or summer will give movement penalties also depending on where you are (and what faction you are playing).

- Squalor in cities with all sanitary buildings and a single unit will keep spiralling out of control until ultimately the city rebels (unless you stack the city full of units, enhancing squalor).

You just have to learn how to balance the population, it is entirely possible to have huge cities with good public order and small garrisons.

A few basic tips are:
Never build higher level farms unless you are absolutely sure you can manage the extra population they will give, you can't destroy them so once they are built you will be stuck with them.

Once you reach Large or Huge city sizes destroy any granaries and agricultural estates, as they only add to growth and in the case of the latter actually reduce public order.

Build as much public order buildings as you can, pretty obvious this one.

Destroy any buildings that were not built by your factions culture, these will give public order penalties. Be careful though when destroying public order buildings though, as it might make things worse in the short term until you can replace them with your own.

Have around 2-4 units garrisoning your larger cities, one unit just isn't enough.

[Jikot]

Hey Bobbin, thanks for the input!

I had a massive response all written up, and just lost it all by clicking the wrong button.

What it came down to was this: I do know that most of my issues with the game are due to the original RTW code, so I hope you didn't take offence (wuv you guys). I was just venting after a very frustrating CTD.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I never realized a lot of the things you suggested, and I guess I still have a lot to learn even after all these years of casual and less casual gaming. Just shows how deep the game is

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

VERY

.

PS: while I'm here; what do schools do?

[Jikot]

Just did the battle again, with similar results. Waited a minute in the victory screen, waited everywhere I could; CTD at exactly the same time.
Seems the computer won't let me win this battle in this way. Oh well, autobattle it is.

[AstroCat]

@bobbin - Oh I was not playing the EB crew at all. I know it is an RTW engine issue. I have nothing but respect for what the people have accomplished with EB. That is why I am hoping the engine upgrades in MTW2 will help the stability, at least sometwhat.

@Jikot - When that happens you probably just need to reload and use the auto win "cheat" and move on in your game.

[Rien]

hey,


i had the same problem, something that made it better was to insall eb outside program files, never save before a battle, wait for 30+ sec after a battle and never play eb longer then 1hour30min (just close game and start over)

hope it helps

[Ludens]

PS: while I'm here; what do schools do?

Mostly they provide your characters with ancillaries. There is also an effect on your characters' traits, but this is more subtle. The basic personality traits (intelligence, charisma, etc.) are set, but you can get learning-related traits such as philosopher or rhetorician. You also can get the pedantic-trait, so it's not all good. Obviously, an intelligent character is more likely to learn something; not sure if the other personality traits have an effect here.

[Folgore]

I think crashes also differ per faction a lot. I remember I had the same problem in my Makedonia campaign, whereas in my current Qart Hadastim campaign, I still do have crashes, but not nearly as many. In fact, I would even go as far as to say it crashes an equal amount of times as vanilla RTW, which does also crash a lot, mind you. I've only had 1 crash as a result of a rebelling settlement (solved by the population cheat) and only a few crashes after battles (even though I never wait with clicking the 'ok' button after winning). Most crashes were during loading.

Come to think of it though, I did play my Makedonia campaign on a different PC, so that is also likely to be a factor.

[Jikot]

Thanks Ludens, I kind of figured they did something along those lines (although I was hoping schools would teach people to freaking wash themselves and thus keep squalor down :)

Just fyi; my homebuilt system:
i7 920 @ 4GHz
6GB ram @ 1600 MHz
ati 5870
intel SSD (cut load times down to 1/4th by my subjective observations)

With these specs it probably shouldn't be crashing at all (my components don't seem to be taxed hard at all during heavy play), so there definitely is a coding issue here on CA's part.

@Folgore: I'm in a Makedon campaign as well, don't know if that's a factor, it's been a while since I played and I mostly play Makedonian.

(another aside question if you'll permit: are the Agrianians better at killing units than their "melee attack" figures suggest? I remember reading a lot on here about units with axes actually killing units as opposed to spearmen merely holding them at bay)

[Jikot]

hey,


i had the same problem, something that made it better was to insall eb outside program files, never save before a battle, wait for 30+ sec after a battle and never play eb longer then 1hour30min (just close game and start over)

hope it helps

That's interesting what you wrote about never saving before a battle. It adds to the risk of losing progress when the game does CTD, but if it works it works!

[QuintusSertorius]

Something else to bear in mind, given you said there were lots of enemy FMs in the battle. I think if you kill both the Faction Leader and Faction Heir in the same engagement that can cause problems.

[Scutarii]

I think this is an issue with my computer power/memory leak/etc but it may be worth noting.

Sometimes the AI will set up something that causes a crash regardless. An example I saw was a battle around Vindobona - there were three full stack (huge unit size) Eleutheroi vs 2 full stack Sweboz that the AI repeatedly sent to battle through a seige.

Regardless of my actions the game always crashed when it tried to resolve that battle. I then manually moved all of those stacks elsewhere on the map and the problem went away.

So, it may be worth playing without the fog of war just to make sure that there aren't AI caused crashes.

[AstroCat]

I don't think it is a system issue. I also have a pretty good setup:

CPU: Q9650 solid OC @3.6Ghz
MB: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6
Mem: G.SKILL 4GB
Case: P182 + (5x)Scythe S-FLEX 120mm fans
PS: Corsair 750TX
VC: EVGA 580 GTX Superclocked
SC: SB X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro
HD: WD6400AAKS 640GB
OD: SAMSUNG DVD±R SH-S203B
OS: dualboot Vista 64 -XP 32

I've tried all the no-save, wait after battles "tricks" and I still will occasionally get a CTD after big battles, especially sieges. I would guess it is a memory error in the RTW engine. Although switching to XP 32bit from Vista 64bit did increase my stability somewhat.

[Randal]

Jikot: Yes. Axes in EB have the Armour Piercing trait which means they ignore half the enemy armour. So against Gallic mercenary swordsmen (6 armour) your Agrianians have an effective attack of 12 instead of 9. Against Principes (12 Armour) 15 attack. Against Hellenic Cataphracts (22 armour) 20 attack.

I am of the opinion that this trait is far too powerful in Rome Total War (and Medieval for that matter) and that EB gives it to too many units on top of that, but that's neither here nor there.

On the subject of stability, the first time I installed EB it crashed all the time and I eventually gave up on my Rome campaign because I couldn't manage to stop an end-turn crash.

But on my current install it literally never crashes. Once in a blue-moon if I do something silly or something weird happens like killing adjacent stacks in a siege, but no after battle or end of turn crashes. I haven't had either in months and months.

I'm not sure what causes this. Perhaps it helps it was a completely fresh install, but I later installed a bunch of other mods including one that I didn't know wasn't mod-foldered that I subsequently managed to delete, and it's still stable as a rock. I did install in a non-programs file directory, but then I did that the first time too. I also tend to spend a minute or so examining my units' kill-rates after each battle so I naturally end up waiting before hitting end-turn.

Perhaps it helps that I nowadays always run Rome as a sort-of full-screen window with the -ne command line option, and regularly alt-tab while the game is processing my turns? This is utterly wild speculation backed by a decided lack of understanding of how a PC works, but perhaps the memory leak somehow doesn't happen if you run it in windowed mode? I have a pretty decent PC but far less powerful than the one mentioned in this thread.

Edit: I also run XP, but then I did on my previous, less-stable install too.

[Tanit]

didn't see if anyone else suggested this, but sometimes leaving the EBscript off until after the battle prevents ctds.

[AstroCat]

didn't see if anyone else suggested this, but sometimes leaving the EBscript off until after the battle prevents ctds.

How would you turn it on and off? I just turn it on as instructed when I load up my game. And doesn't it need to be on for certain events such as taking cities?

[Urg]

The CTDs also turned me off playing EB for quite a while. The game is probably the best game ever, but CTDs are just too frustrating.

Now I'm desperate to play again.

Btw, I also found that I have less crashes when playing Qart, whereas some other factions crash after almost every battle (I can't now remember which ones were the worst).

[Tanit]

How would you turn it on and off? I just turn it on as instructed when I load up my game. And doesn't it need to be on for certain events such as taking cities?

I just mean that if a battle ctd's, when you reload, do not turn the script on when told to until after the battle. Sometimes it helps, though if the battle is during an AI turn you end up losing two seasons.

[AstroCat]

Ok, I see what you are saying. Also just for the record I've been using the Romans for my games and getting the post-battle CTDs. I wonder if the Roman faction are more prone to CTDs because of all the extra mod work they received, perhaps higher memory usage?

[Randal]

My worst crashes were in my Carthaginian game on the old install.

In my current Roman game I'm in Marian times and have conquered 2/3rds of the historical Roman Empire (and a bit of extra Africa) and I haven't had more than a couple of crashes.

I'm not sure what the causes are but I don't think it's anything like that.

[Jebivjetar]

I play EB on ~700MB RAM and have CTD only in rare occasions. I also have one of the memory optimizer programs installed on my comp (before i launch EB i always free and compress my RAM) and my EB runs much faster and crashes more rarely than before the memory software was installed.

[Imperator Invictus]

I play EB on ~700MB RAM and have CTD only in rare occasions. I also have one of the memory optimizer programs installed on my comp (before i launch EB i always free and compress my RAM) and my EB runs much faster and crashes more rarely than before the memory software was installed.

I do the same....almost no crashes (only 2 times in 2 years of EB)

[AstroCat]

Very interesting, I've never heard of using a memory optimizer with EB before. Which one do you use? Do people think this really could help stabilize EB?

[Jebivjetar]

Very interesting, I've never heard of using a memory optimizer with EB before. Which one do you use? Do people think this really could help stabilize EB?

It helped me. Alot ^^ I use http://www.bitbitcare.com/, and since i have it, EB launches much faster and runs more smoothly than before. Just remember to free and compress your RAM before you start playing :)

[Rien]

That's interesting what you wrote about never saving before a battle. It adds to the risk of losing progress when the game does CTD, but if it works it works!

i always safe before i go to the next turn so i never lose more than 1 turn.

[Jikot]

I too would like to hear more about this memory optimizer. Is that just for EB or does it generally optimize your rams?

[AstroCat]

I don't think it is generally advised to use memory optimizers on Vista/Win7 but on XP perhaps this could help?

[Jebivjetar]

. Is that just for EB or does it generally optimize your rams?

The latter. I suggest you give it a try, experiment a little bit and see the results.

[Blxz]

i always safe before i go to the next turn so i never lose more than 1 turn.

Alot can happen in one turn. Plus the autosave can take care of most problems.