Persistent CTD

[Sygrod]

:help:
OK, guys. I am at my wits' end.

I have tried to refight the same battle at least 15 times and get a :furious3: CTD every time. I don't even know where to start looking for the problem. I just nicely get the battle started after a good 15 minutes of loading game, loading campaign, starting battle and setting up. First my pontic slingers let loose on the enemy laying siege to Damaskos as it is parading by. It is larger and has lots of sarissas so I don't want to autosolve it, or I'll loose a good part of my elite veteran army and probably Damaskos with it. I send my general out with my horse archers and everything is fine. They go where I want them to. Then I select a unit and CTD. It doesn't seem to matter which unit i select. The CTD invariably hits as a unit is selected some time during the battle.

Edit: Last battle I had the enemy whittled down by 30% after sending out my slingers and battering the enemy line and then CTD struck after around 20 minutes of battle. I was just about to win - go figure.

This CTD business is bloody infuriating. I have never in my life come across a game that was so unstable (referring to RTW). On top of that, there is no indication why it happened. I need some help here. I can't finish my campaign now, because of this GD CTD nonsense.

I've looked for updated drivers, but seem to have the latest that matter, I've got 1.5 GIG RAM and plenty of swap file space. The bug fixes listed do not apply to this CTD problem, which only happens in battle mode. AND I've minimized graphics. Checked graphics card temperature - fine. Etc, etc.

Edit: I even went back to a prior version of the driver and still get CTD. And yes, it is the well known NVidia GeForce 6200.

I've searched fori (pl of forum), found helpful tips, but to no avail. :wall:

:help:

[bovi]

What is the composition of the armies? Try to attack with only one of your units and see if it still crashes, if not then one of your units is to blame. If it still crashes, try to sacrifice one unit for an autoresolve which might clear things up, and then send your full army to make the battlefield battle. You could also try to load a savegame from a couple of turns back, which might make the cause not occur the same way. Sorry, but it is mere guesses.

Oh, and of course restart your computer. I'm sure you did in order to downgrade the driver. Incidentally, did you clean out the new driver entirely before installing the old one? That is extremely important with NVidia's drivers.

[Sygrod]

Yes, yes and yes.

I have restarted a couple of dozen times. I've cleaned off unneccessary processes under task Manager, I've defragged, I've upgraded and downgraded the video driver AND cleaned the driver off completely with DriverClean. Only thing I haven't done is a memory check, because I could not find a suitable free utility for that. In a different forum some CTDs were thought to be caused by sound files or idle animations. My video options are minimal - not because my machine slowed down, but because i keep getting CTDs.

The really annoying part is that the CTD doesn't hit at exactly the same moment every time.

[bovi]

Your yeses don't make sense as answers. Did you try this?

What is the composition of the armies? Try to attack with only one of your units and see if it still crashes, if not then one of your units is to blame. If it still crashes, try to sacrifice one unit for an autoresolve which might clear things up, and then send your full army to make the battlefield battle. You could also try to load a savegame from a couple of turns back, which might make the cause not occur the same way.

About the memory test, perhaps this will do the trick: http://www.memtest.org/.
Do you happen to have a friend whose video/sound cards you could borrow?

[Sygrod]

Didn't try the army thing. My army is besieged. No other army is close by. Last savegame is a couple of dozen turns and several large battles back.
Unfortunately no videocard owning friend nearby.

[bovi]

Then try disbanding the various types of units you have.

[Skandaz.Imperator]

Play as the pontos, eh? Never had as many CTDs as when I played as pontos...

[Sygrod]

"Play as the pontos, eh? Never had as many CTDs as when I played as pontos..."

Now, those were comforting words..