[CTDs] kind of sick of it

[Jikot]

Lately I'm getting CTDs every hour or so, and this is while i'm turtling so battles are few and far between. A conservative estimate would be one CTD every three battles, even after implementing most of the measures suggested in the thread. Disheartening is what it is.

Any indications on CTDs for the EBII alpha/beta? Surely there has been some testing done by now, and I could use some good news.

[QuintusSertorius]

You're using Vista/Windows 7 aren't you? Seems to be people with new 64-bit operating systems that have issues. Been running on XP with very few CTDs, bar the usual "game did something naughty on the AI turn" type stuff. I still save every turn, mind, and before initiating a battle out of force of habit.

[Folgore]

TIP: Don't post here that your campaign hardly ever crashes, because the Gods will punish your arrogance and make your campaign crash three times in the same battle the next day.

:(

[AstroCat]

It has been my experience that the game is more stable under 32 bit XP than 64 bit Vista, but I still do get the after battle CTDs in XP, just not as often. I haven't tried using a memory manager yet in XP, I wonder if that really helps.

[Rahl]

I've a relative new computer and use WIn7 64 bit and I can't say that my game crashes more often compared to my old pc with xp, though that one was quite old. But actually it doesn't crash to often at all I would say.

[Jikot]

You're using Vista/Windows 7 aren't you? Seems to be people with new 64-bit operating systems that have issues. Been running on XP with very few CTDs, bar the usual "game did something naughty on the AI turn" type stuff. I still save every turn, mind, and before initiating a battle out of force of habit.

Yup, 64-bit win7. Hadn't occurred to me that might be a factor.

Now I've resorted to saving and exiting the game whenever I'm attacked, and then re-opening the game right after to do the battle, seems to work for now. I'll consider this a full-blown fix if there aren't any more CTDs, as I'd much rather exit and re-open a game than see the game crash after an epic 1.5 hour battle.

[Jikot]

Yeah, even that is just not working. I even started rebooting my computer before a battle.

Just had another epic battle go to waste because of another CTD. Screw this, I'm done with the game.

[QuintusSertorius]

Yeah, even that is just not working. I even started rebooting my computer before a battle.

Just had another epic battle go to waste because of another CTD. Screw this, I'm done with the game.

Have you tried Theages' suggestion from this thread?

Your issue is with your 64-bit OS and RTW being not terribly compatible with it.

[Africanus]

I'm running my latest Romani campaign on a vista 64 machine with 8G of RAM, and quite frankly, it hasn't been bad at all. Maybe three or four frustrating crashes the entire campaign and I'm down to 133 B.C. I'm pretty sure I had far more CTD's on my v32 machine.

I'm still getting several CTD's, but nearly every one has been during the AI turn when I'm laying seige and a relieving army comes to confront me. Almost always it's the first battle of the turn, so I'm lucky in that I don't lose anything, just reload and hit end turn again.

I've been playing very defensive so I'm not initiating many battles, maybe that has something to do with it. I'm also making sure to to save and reload anytime I do initiate a battle during my turn.

[Jikot]

I save very regularly, and besides the battles I'm not losing much progress because of the CTDs; but it's always the most critical battles that end up crashing.
You work your ass of trying to keep your army standing against all odds, and you micro the living snot out of your little units to squeeze every last bit of fight out of them.
But then the game just crashes as if to say "let's see you do that again poopyhead".

I don't feel like trying out any more fixes, seems like nothing works, and judging by the comments Theages' suggestion is also getting mixed results. So much so that I honestly don't believe the lack of crashes has nothing to do with the fix, but rather with mere luck (I too have gone countless hours without crashes before).

As an aside; after the last CTD I've just been rushing through what would have been a massively epic campaign, and the "lost turn" thing is getting out of hand. Sometimes I can't move an army (without a general) for two-three turns, and sometimes I can only advance a tiny tiny bit, for two-three turns in a row (this happened to my fleet once as well, and it kept me from ferrying some urgently needed back-up). As always this happens at the most critical of times. So annoying it's funny.

[vollorix]

There was a thread somewhere on this forums suggesting to use some kind of extension/adjustment for win64 os ( not a RAM optimizer, iirc ) to force the game engine to utilize the whole available RAM. It needed some ( partly significant ) changes for your settings, though, but i can´t remember what it was exactly. I thought i have saved that topic to my favorites, but that´s not a case :( Does anyone remember what it?

[Jikot]

And now the game keeps hanging at the end of the other factions' turns. If I leave the game and come back, the turn seems to have been completed and I can simply go about my turn, only I did not get any notifications, which made me miss two riots.
Is the game that upset that I'm winning?

@vollorix, is this what you're talking about?
If not I'd like to hear about this ram optimizer.

[Jikot]

And now I'm officially stuck.
The game hangs during the eleutheroi's turn, and won't budge. The turn is no longer completed and I cannot go on with the game.
Guess the computer wins after all. Lousy cheat.

EDIT: this is after several computer reboots.

[Ibn-Khaldun]

Jikot - This might happen because some city rebels. You should toggle fog of war off and check all the cities. If you find the city then reduce the population there or add some units into the garrison. There are others who know more about it.
I haven't had a CTD with EB for a long time. At least I don't remember any of them.

[QuintusSertorius]

And now I'm officially stuck.
The game hangs during the eleutheroi's turn, and won't budge. The turn is no longer completed and I cannot go on with the game.
Guess the computer wins after all. Lousy cheat.

EDIT: this is after several computer reboots.

Reboots won't fix this; as Ibn-Khaldun just said, sounds like a rebellion-causing-CTD, which is a fairly standard problem. As mentioned, toggle off the fog of war and hopefully you should be able to spot the offending settlement. Then you go back to your save and amend the city to remove the problem.

[AstroCat]

To be honest the only crashes I can't rid of are the after battle crashes. These are such a killer for me and have really dampened my enthusiasm for EB, which I think is an amazing game/mod, if I could just play it! I have tried everything on different OS's and systems and the after battle CTDs just seem like a permanent deal. They are worse after big siege battle for sure, and I believe it is a totally memory leak error that EB brings to the surface because it is pushing the engine harder than was intended. I never had any crashes in vanilla RTW after battles. I would really love to play this mod, so hopefully we get EBII before RTW2! :)

[Ibn-Khaldun]

I'm sure that this has nothing to do with CTD's but after I switched to windowed mode I haven't had crashes like I said before. Perhaps you should try it?

[vollorix]

@Jikot: yes, it is. So i assume that didn´t work either for you?
Hmm.. i´m curious, would it make any difference to boost up the VGA Ram ( though the GTX 580 has allready over 1500 MB ), to say.. 2 or even 4 gigs version? Since EB uses really heavy textures compared to vanilla, one could presume, a 5970 VGA should be able to handle it, before the system Ram gets over flooded, shouldn´t it?

[Ludens]

Thread moved & title changed

[Jikot]

@Jikot: yes, it is. So i assume that didn´t work either for you?
Hmm.. i´m curious, would it make any difference to boost up the VGA Ram ( though the GTX 580 has allready over 1500 MB ), to say.. 2 or even 4 gigs version? Since EB uses really heavy textures compared to vanilla, one could presume, a 5970 VGA should be able to handle it, before the system Ram gets over flooded, shouldn´t it?

I have a 5870 which has 1GB of VRAM, I honestly think this is more than enough for this game.

@Ibn Khaldun
I'll try your suggestion tomorrow, I really hope I can revive my stuck game this way. I'd hate to see all those hours go to waste :)

@AstroCat
I also cannot speak highly enough of this mod, it really is the most amazing game I ever played. There's just so much there it feels like a crime not to have to pay for it. You can even role-play for god's sake (if that's your bag, man).
I would play this game just to satisfy the amateur history buff within me, and the phenomenal gameplay just sweetens the deal.
The greater the pity that I can't actually play it the way it's supposed to be played.

Again, I know these issues are hard-coded, so I'm not pointing any fingers at the EB devs, except maybe fingers of praise and adoration.

[Jikot]

Alright, I've backtraced the issue, and it would seem that an eleutheroi town in Germania is trying to attack a Casse (weird right?) army just outside of their town. The eleutheroi town's army just wiggles back and forth between the now empty town and the casse army.
The town isn't rebelling or anything, and seems to have ample troops (full stack) to take on the wayward Casse army (one single-star general and one unit), so I'm not sure how I can manipulate things to get the game going again.
I tried adding another unit to the already full-stack army inside the town, hoping it would spawn next to the town and somehow unblock the stuck game, but apparently the console doesn't recognize ANY of the units in the game when using the "create_unit" cheat (I literally tried them all).
So yeah.

[QuintusSertorius]

Did you check the EDU for the "internal" names of the units? Because they aren't always (or even often) the same as on the card.

For example levy hoplites are "greek infantry taxeis hoplitai".

[Jikot]

@quintus
That might indeed be a factor; it also crossed my mind afterwards.

I resolved the issue by going back some five turns (the first four turns - which I also saved - invariably yielded the same crash). This of course meant re-doing about 3 minor and major battles per turn, which did of course involve a number of after-battle CTDs. Damn the AI with its tiny yet ubiquitous armies which can still take out multiple generals when auto-attacked. It sucked major popsickles, but hey, at least I got the game going again.

[Jikot]

Aaaaaand now the game crashes as soon as I hit "continue campaign" or select the last saved game.
That'll do game, that'll do.