On CTD, some speculation

If you could confirm this, or hit me with a sweboz stick:

I had a couple game saves scrapped by persistent CTDs. I've read and checked all this and this:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=103681
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=101971

and I still had problems.

Here's what I noticed:

-It seems that a game that is frequently saved and reloaded gets eventually corrupted. I try to create a new save file each time, erasing the old one eventually.

-The autosave doesn't seems too stable, I try to avoid using it at all cost.

-It is possible to save a game in the battle menu between turns. This is something I did before but I think this had nasty consequences. By example, one of my stacks is attacked by an unexpected (and quite huge) stack of AS mercenaries (where they get all this money, it's fascinating... err... anyway, another debate :laugh4:). I can save the game right then. Of course, the temptation of reloading the game if a heart-wrenching defeat occurs is strong. BUUUUT... that means that I load a game without activating the advisor thingy, and the turns end... normally? Not sure. I activate the script as soon as my turn comes around and the game looks fine, but perhaps 20 turns, 30 turns after that, weird things arrive. Diplomats with a skill of 2 who routinely bribe my cities away... The invincible makedonian pentekoroi destroys entire triereis fleets... Then the game crashes for good. Cause of death: fatal recurring ctds. Now, I learned to eat dirt and cry when I'm defeated and I don't reload my games between turns. Romans didn't load their game after Cannae either.

I had fewer unexplained CTDs and I have an AS campaign well in the 230s and still doing fine.

Am I lost in the woods or am I close to something?

(by the way I'm sorry if I'm not clear, english is not my first language)


(oh and I've got EB1.1 on a XP pro pc with 2.2 dual core and 2 gigs of ram. my graphic card is a GEforce 8800)

While I'm not certain that saving/loading right before a battle causes these problems you're talking about, I believe it has a destabilizing effect, yes. Particularly when saving right before taking a city, it seems to provoke the crash upon selecting the city's fate.

uh oh... thanks for the advice :surprised:

Yeah thanks for the fast response!

Where do you disable autosaves? I can't see it in the preferences.txt. Is it on one of the menus?

I never actually use autosaves anyway, I save before clicking next turn every turn, so it's redundant for me.

It's in preferences.txt, just change AUTO_SAVE to FALSE.

I must be going blind...

Dol Guldur of FATW has said that the only cause of crashes they could find in that mod was the autosave (although I've got the RTW army-within-an-army problem in FATW too).

Since there unfortunately seems to still be more causes of crashes in EB, I would not recommend disabling the autosave. As you remember to save each turn anyway, it should be perfectly safe though.

I remember that manually saving every turn was in the one of the guides from 0.8x, and I've never stopped doing it since reading that.

Since version 1.1 the number of crashes has increased tremendously for me. Especially after installing the temporary scriptfixes, it is impossible to smoothly play a campaign past 200 B.C. - the crash potential seems to increase progressively as the game goes on.

After abandoning my latest campaign i reinstalled EB, applying only the permanent fixes, deleting the client ruler part of EBBS.TXT, adding some battle formation mods and the city mod 4.0 i did not encounter a single crash; the campaign is at 222 B.C., alive and kickin'! And believe me, i am causing rebellions in AI controlled cities a lot.

I have autosave enabled, create a permanent new save every year, between battles on AI turn plus quicksaving (habit!) every now and then when its my turn.

@dominique: The Romans did not reload the campaign at Cannae, i am convinced Hannibal reloaded a couple of times!!!

:dizzy2: ahhh another wild swing...

Were we suppose to uninstall EB1.0 before installing 1.1?

@Schlappi: No roman fan here (my god were they sore losers!) but now that you say it, it seems to me that Hannibal was a cheat. Probably a thin nerd with a lisp, never had a woman, would have been a forum bully.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dominique

:dizzy2: ahhh another wild swing...

Were we suppose to uninstall EB1.0 before installing 1.1?

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No, definitely not! 1.1 is complete in and of itself, installing one over the other will do nothing at best, and cause all kinds of problems at worst.

So indeed, YES, you were supposed to uninstall EB 1.0 first.

Quote:

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Especially after installing the temporary scriptfixes, it is impossible to smoothly play a campaign past 200 B.C.

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Yes, we've had reports of this, presuming you're talking about the optional, unverified fixes. LordBula is working on an alternative way to create the client rulers, where we won't have to use the script at all. It will require some manual attention from the player though. We're currently having problems discerning recruited generals from adopted ones.