MTW crashing or getting hung up on loading? A couple solutions.

[Martok]

Hey everyone,

Since it's an issue that keeps cropping up from time to time, I'm putting up LeftEyeNine's post about it. (For those of you unaware, LEN is our wonderful assistant moderator in the Apothecary, and is one of our primary troubleshooters for people's technical problems.) If anyone is having MTW loading issues and/or CTD's, please try these solutions first before posting about it.

If none of these methods solve your problem, please do not start a new thread. Instead, you should post your difficulties here, and the good folks in the Apothecary will do their best to help you out.

Now, without further ado....

Since it seems that Medieval Total War 's CTDs seem endless, we need a sticky over here to gather general methods to overcome this problem. Credits go to all those that dealt with this hassle and figured out something to help.

Above all usual routine of checking your all kinds of drivers and DirectX being up-to-date, here are the options you may try to solve your situation with MTW. Please use this thread to ask for help if none of these options work for you, instead of opening a new seperate thread. Here we go:

• MTW is an old buddy, so that sometimes updated video drivers bug him. Therefore, especially if you have a 5xxx series Nvidia graphics card, try reverting your video drivers to v61.76's, credited to be the most compatible graphics driver with MTW. However if you have a newer generation gfx card compared to 5xxx, this set may cause problems all over, may not even be a solution for MTW.

How to revert to an older set of drivers in a clean way:

1- Download Nvidia ForceWare v61.76 (Windows XP/2000 version. Browse to Nvidia.com for other OS versions). Do not install yet.
2- Uninstall your current gfx drivers from Add/Remove Program through your Control Panel which can be accessed through Start button of your Windows.
3- Get Driver Cleaner Professional and install it. The download link is a bit down the page. (Program also has a commercial version called Platinum which promises to have been better optimized, but this free version will do the trick for us)
4- Restart your computer and when your PC is about to load windows press F8 button to bring up loading options of Windows. Choose Safe Mode, hit enter and let it load windows that way.
5- When Safe Mode is loaded, it may give you a warning saying what this Safe Mode is all about. Just click right away to get it fully open.
6- Now run Driver Cleaner Professional. Since this is the Safe Mode where there are no visual supports, hence screen resolution is low, you may not be able to find the shorcut on your desktop. In that case you may try browsing your Program Files folder and find Driver Cleaner there and run its .exe from that location.
7- Now that you have Driver Cleaner Pro run, you must select Nvidia from Cleaning Selection dropdown menu.
8- Click Start and let it do the job. When it is finished you'll see Cleaning Finished! message at the bottom of the program window.
9- It's time to restart your PC after all thorough cleaning, so be it.
10- When you are normally logged into Wndows, it may say New Hardware Found blah blah, just click cancel and install old version drivers which were already downloaded. It will ask for another restart, and when that is done, you're done with downgrading your driver set peacefully.

• Another fix (recommended generally to Nvidia 6xxx/7xxx owners) is forcing Antialiasing 2x. This is done by:

1- Right Click your desktop and Properties > Settings > Advanced.
2- Look for the tab labelled by your graphics card model name.
3- Click "Performance & Quality Settings" from the panel opened leftwards.
4- Under General Driver Settings there should be a box telling the name of the settings and their values, such as "Antialiasing - Application Controlled", "Anisotropic Filtering - Application Controlled" and so on. Now you should left click where it says Antialiasing. You should see that there is a checkbox saying "Application Controlled" ticked. Remove the tick, so that now the slider is controllable. Draw the slider right for once, it should be now under 2x. Click Apply, then OK, another OK to close this window with modified settings. Voila!

• Try playing with Strategy Map and Battle Map resolutions. For example it always used to crush when I set the Strategy Map Resolution any higher than 800*600. It is also said that keeping both Strategy Map and Battle Map resolutions equal helps.

• As we have mentioned by the beginning, MTW does not get on well with newer GPU's. If you have such gear, you may try disabling AGP Texture Acceleration. Here is how:

1- Click Start, Run...
2- Type "dxdiag" without hyphens.
3- If it asks for something related to WHQL, you can say "No" to skip that stuff and get to DirectX Diagnostics window right away.
4- When you're there, click "Display" tab up there. And then find "AGP Texture Acceleration" somewhere in the middle. It is probably already enabled, so click Disable button next to it to get done. Click Exit to close this window now.

So it is all this for now. If you have any other solution, feel free to contact me by PM so I can update the info gathered here.

Thanks again to all contributors who helped solving this issue.