Just to add a bit more to the evidence ... I continued playing around with my Roman switch game... and I found the 'other half' of my ghost general walking around in southern Italy! Quite by accident, as I was looking for every single army, checking if they were moving around and changing what they did. I hovered the cursor over another FM figure on the camp map - wondering 'why does it look odd?' and it dawned on me it looked odd because it had no flag! Anyway, when I went to select it it gave me the name of the general in Burgidala (and his identical stats...) then faded away to a ghost. So this one was actually a clone, not just yet another duplicate name. On the character list scroll it was then showing the guy in Tara, even though the 'other half' was in the city in Burgidala. However, once I moved the other one out of the city, the character scroll then showed he was IN Burgidala, and not Tara. It was definitely two instances of the same character - same age, traits, portrait, everything.

I really don't know if this is the cause of the crash or not, and as he was only 35 years old, I suppose I'd need to go all the way back 20 years to (hopefully) avoid him getting cloned.

I let the guy in Burgidala get himself heroically sacrificed for the greater good of Rome (and the Saba campaign I hoped to switch back to) but alas it didn't cure the crash.

Quote Originally Posted by Bovi
The Romani have a particularly large chance of getting duplicate names because they only have one last name. Perhaps we should consider adding a number of other invisible last names too. This would obviously make it even harder to figure out the internal name of a Romani, but if it can avoid late-game crashes it ought to be worth it.
Good idea, if it can be done. I was surpised looking at my Roman character list how many FMs had identical names - I think there were two names that occured three times and a couple of others that occured twice. And IIRC that must have been third to half of all the Roman FMs, so a pretty high incidence. Speaking personally I'd rather have a less CTD-prone late game than the ability to easily use a cheat I don't use anyway