[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 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.

[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 (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?103089-After-battle-CTD...&p=1917393&viewfull=1#post1917393)?

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 (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?103089-After-battle-CTD...&p=1917393&viewfull=1#post1917393) 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.