OK, so which faction is the least prone to CTDs?

**macsen rufus** · 01-01-2010, 04:25

I absolutely love what EB is trying to do, but I have hit a wall with CTDs and bugs. I'm not playing the game as a game any more, I'm thinking about "will this cause a CTD?" before thinking about "is this good strategy?"

Pretty much every time I play the game I'm at the very least running a defrag (most of the fragmented files on my machine are from EB1.2....), or re-installing the whole thing. NO matter what I do I cannot get my Sabyn campaign past 218BC. I've rolled back to 230BC and tried replaying etc etc etc but EVERY time I get to 218BC I started getting save-game corruptions. Usually it starts around autumn 218BC when re-loaded save games start saying they're a season off (ie an 'autumn' save shows as 'summer' when it's reloaded) from which I can play onwards, but further saves are either TOTALLY unloadable, or at best give me the 14AD bug or CTD on running the EBBS script.

It is driving me insane, it's like groundhog day, having to replay those years over and over and over and over again, but no matter how far I go back (I save EVERY season.... ) it always gets corrupted by 217BC.

I have the quick-fixes installed, I've destroyed all my Type 4 governments, I've run turns on end without training or building... has anyone ever got past this date as Saba?

As for rebellions, I've had Gerrha and Axum and Palmyra rebel in my favour without problems (well, not technical problems... strategically I was taken by surprise

) and I've also had a city rebel BACK to the Ptolomaioi without crash or corruption.

So, basically I love the mod --- when IT WORKS -- but I am pig sick of CTDs and unloadable save-games, so want to know which faction, if any, people have managed to take through to a victory without all that hassle?

ETA: and who decided where to put Ratae on the map, and give it to the Coritanii?

**lionhard** · 01-01-2010, 23:41

Maybe try using EB with alexander that will half the CTD's u have for sure and i think a lot of the CTd's r after battles and when the computer is generating the AI's behaviour so it doesnt matter what faction u r

**anubis88** · 01-01-2010, 23:59

It is definetly wierd that you have as much CTDs. I usually have almost none, with whichever faction. They do tend to be more frequent as the campaign progresses, but i'm talking way beyond 200BC.

You should probably reinstall everything

**Cute Wolf** · 01-02-2010, 07:14

Well, did you allready take Gaza, Hierosolyma, Tyre, or other "hot contested" areas of AS and Ptolies land? If you doing that, try to destroy every building on these cities, and rebuilt it with your own, using process_cq and add_money cheat of course, but this isn't considered heavy cheating because:

1) The building shown limit sometimes hide several AI govt structures and barracks, that was constantly respawned on especially hot contested areas, I've seen as much as 3 Ptolies and 4 AS govt marker in Hierosolyma when I march toward them, and if they are still hidden from view (because they allready got too many buildings inside), they will start causing CTD made by several existance of same buildings in one city.
2) If the original faction owner is allready dead (AS or Ptolies is dead), and your province is in the red, there will be a CTD each time they try to rebel back to their descr_regions owner. Of course, if you use BI, adding "re_emergent" in descr_strat is a valid way to avoid this kind of CTD.

**macsen rufus** · 01-03-2010, 13:58

Thanks for the replies...

I have re-installed many times already, and I don't have Alex - did have BI but can't re-install it (unless I do all the registry cleaning etc etc etc...) The game HAS run very well for fiftty years or so, but once I get to this time frame it gets progressively crankier until it gives up altogether

I'm not a great fan of RTW so am totally unfamiliar with the cheats and building limits and the various descr files (I would have uninstalled it ages ago if I hadn't been waiting for a chance to try EB).

Yeah, I have noticed that captured cities often have more than one 'government type' building in them - I've destroyed these, or left them and repaired them etc in various combinations but still end up with the CTDs around the same time. I did get as far as capturing Hierosolyma once, but was totally unprepared to hold it and it rebelled back to Ptolemaioi after a couple of years (no crash!). I think that was when I went back about fifteen years and rethought my strategy to allow me to move my capital to Petra (Sinai is littered with 'heroic battle' markers, the Ptolies just won't leave me alone - it has been a BRUTAL war

)

So, I might try to re-do the whole install from scratch and get BI re-installed and try running it from that... hope that's better. And maybe learn how to cheat and use RomeShell after all

Thanks for the ideas, folks, I'm loving this Saba campaign so much I really can't face giving up on it

Oh, and if it's any help for debuggers - usually when it CTDs during the AI turns, it throws up a 'pure virtual function called' error message, so could there be a bit of C++ scripting that could be tightened up a bit?

**Cute Wolf** · 01-03-2010, 14:06

I'm quite sure it was your multiple govt buildings that made you get teh CTD

**macsen rufus** · 01-03-2010, 14:26

I was thinking along those lines, when I noticed in Palmyra (which rebelled from AS to me quite out of the blue one day) one time it came back to me again, it had my old govt building (100% damage) and TWO AS Type II govt buildings, both also 100% damage - I destroyed all these and went back to the 'provisional military govt' building next round. I had similar problems when Axum and Gerrha first came over, and that 'fix' of destroying all of the govt buildings and rolling back to the 'provisional' got those past their CTDs, but the 218/217BC CTDs seem to be something that I can't see. Perhaps I should try the trick I saw in another thread - load up the last good save again, toggle between factions and look for duplicate buildings. Looked a bit complex, as I said, I'm not too familiar with the RTW engine, but perhaps I'll re-read that thread!

Thanks, Cute Wolf, you're giving me hope

Edit to add:

Well, as the CTDs seemed most frequent during Romani turns, I tried taking over the Romans for a turn or two to see if I could get past it. Haven't yet, but I did notice some strange things - a lot of their provinces had multiple govt building issues, but more strangely was when I reverted back to Saba from the new save game, so did all my old provinces - typically there was the 'provisional government' and one copy of the main govt building, both with 100% damage, AND also a complete duplicate of the main building. In some cases (ie Axum I think....) there was also a 100% damaged building from a foreign culture. So is this normal, switching between factions, or just a further symptom of my corrupted savegame?

In a sense it looks like when provinces change hands, buildings aren't actually destroyed they just get 100% damage and become invisible. So if there is a limit to the number of buildings per settlement, there could be loads of duplicated buildings that only show when it's relaoded or the player takes over... curiouser and curiouser.

**fallen851** · 01-03-2010, 23:25

The only CTD's I get are the stupid after battle CTD's. I generally get them one in every eight battles, and I always wait for the music to stop to go forward (about 20 seconds).

Then again, I have the instances of rebels turned way down, so most of my battles are large, usually full stack vs full stack, and often have reinforcements and probably involve a lot of traits.

And so far they have never been repeatable. It just gets really frustrating to fight battles over again, especially when I just barely pull it out.

**-42-** · 01-04-2010, 05:02

The only times I have had CTDs are when I go to the battle map where an army contains Ambushers, for some reason they have no sprites at long distance, so it occasionally glitches.

**bovi** · 01-04-2010, 14:21

The governments are tricky. We want the AI to create the best possible governments, but as it has no idea of the concept they're for, it generally chooses poorly, or not at all (even worse). This is why we always generate a new gov building when an AI takes over a city. It's not all that common for a settlement to change hands extremely often though, so it should only cause a rare crash.

I'll add a solution to the frequent issues though, about taking over settlements that have been contested a lot and destroying all the gov buildings. Thankfully we won't have as much problems with the government buildings in EB2.

**Africanus** · 01-04-2010, 16:40

Originally Posted by fallen851

The only CTD's I get are the stupid after battle CTD's. I generally get them one in every eight battles, and I always wait for the music to stop to go forward (about 20 seconds).

Me too. I've reached 174 B.C. and the CTD's seem to be coming more frequently the further I go...

And so far they have never been repeatable. It just gets really frustrating to fight battles over again, especially when I just barely pull it out.

Times like that I'll use the auto_win cheat rather than re-fight. What's more frustrating to me are the times I beat up the opposition pretty good, because an auto_win will usually give me more casualties than I took actually fighting the battle.

**Unintended BM** · 01-06-2010, 03:46

I'm having a similar probelm that the TC was having. I'm being Makedonia, and it's around 216. I don't know if the time frame is coincidental. I was able to get through a few turns by unpopulating some other rebelling towns with the console, but every turn it crashes if I don't mess with things.

**XSamatan** · 01-12-2010, 21:33

Did you apply the sweboz reform marker fix?
You CTD could be due to more buildings (reform markers count as buildings) in a city than RTW can handle.

XSamatan

**macsen rufus** · 01-24-2010, 02:15

Well, folks, a little update....

I started a new Saba campaign from year dot and can report a much better performance, crash-wise.The only real difference I've made is that when I've re-loaded save-games I have QUIT and RESTARTED EB. It makes one heck of a difference! :D (Oh, and I've made a few strategic choices differently, and Rome is about to go extinct

)

I've made it all the way through to 212BC with no corrupted saves and no real major crashes. In all that time I've had about 3 CTDs, all on entering battle, and all fixed by a reload and minor changes (like attacking from a different grid etc etc).

Seems to me the big issue is that you must restart the game if you're reloading. Any ctrl-S/ctrl-L action causes the 14AD bug, at the least....