Frustrated with CTDs when I select captured settlement's fate after a long battle

[FriendlyFire]

I find that the chance of a post-battle CTD increases the longer I've been playing and the more battles I've fought in a session. So I've got in the habit of doing a quicksave before every battle, and of quitting and restarting EB completely after 2-3 long battles.

When a CTD does occur, I reload from the quicksave, type 'auto_win attacker' (or defender, as appropriate) into the console on the pre-battle screen, and just auto-resolve it. Yes, you'll typically take more casualties, but it's better than 30-60 minutes of your life

IMO the advice never to save before a battle and never to use a quicksave is less than helpful. The post-battle CTDs have all the hallmarks of a memory leak growing to the point where the process cannot allocate more memory when it's trying to switch modes from "battle" from "campaign". Saving or not saving should have little or no impact on this. I diagnose this sort of stuff in my day job, so I've been meaning to hook up the process to some tools and figure out what's happening. The problem is playing to the point where I can reliably trigger a post-battle CTD. Repros are always the hardest!

[Stelios]

FriendlyFire, I agree with your first point, that sounds like a good idea and I will try that. However, it is usually after two or three normal, decent length battles, then a big one. I guess it is all the same to the game engine. As for autoresolving, I would, but it's one of those where I want to guarantee certain outcomes (i.e. five Makedonian family members dying in one battle!), so that's out. I still want to diagnose the issue and install fixes, if that is possilbe while keeping my current game.

[jirisys]

1. Delete your map.rwm (.../EB/Data/world/maps/base/ - make a backup)

2. Create a shortcut ".../Activision/Rome - Total War/RomeTW.exe" -mod:eb -nm -show_err -ne note the position of the "

3. Start EB via that shortcut, start or continue a campaign, and quit the game

4. Go back to .../EB/Data/world/maps/base, and copy the newly generated map.rwm to .../EB/sp game edu backup and say "Yes" to overwrite again

5. Before you do anything else. Go to .../Activision/Rome - Total War, and copy the corrected_regions.tga to .../EB/Data/world/maps/base. Rename the file to REGIONS.tga (delete the old one first)

6. Use the same shortcut, fight the battle (or auto-resolve), choose the settlement's fate. If it didn't CTD: congratulations! You have done what I did

7. Use your regular EB shortcut

8. Enjoy... (Until you CTD again)

~Jirisys (At least I'm helping)

[Stelios]

Thanks jirisys, but I have to take this somewhat slow, again, I'm sorry for my technical incomptence. I navigated to C:games/EB/Data/world/maps/base, and I see a list of DESCR files and tga files, and the abovementioned map.rwm. How do I make a backup of that file, exactly?

[jirisys]

Thanks jirisys, but I have to take this somewhat slow, again, I'm sorry for my technical incomptence. I navigated to C:games/EB/Data/world/maps/base, and I see a list of DESCR files and tga files, and the abovementioned map.rwm. How do I make a backup of that file, exactly?

Make a backup = Store somewhere else (cutting is better so you don't go back and delete it); Change the name (MapBackup.rwm; Map.rwm.backup; etc), send it to the recycler bin and restore if it didn't work ( needs some skills to do that)

~Jirisys (Talk to me if you encounter any other problem)

[Stelios]

Ok, I understand step 1, now I do not understand step 2. You want me to create a shortcut to vanilla RTW, with ( -mod:eb -nm -show_err -ne ) on the end? Also, your RTW directory is under Activision, mine is under Games, so my path looks like ( C:\Games\RomeTW.exe ). I assume that doesn't matter? I am slightly unclear how to create a shortcut. I went to "Properties" of my RTW.exe, added ( -mod:eb -nm -show_err -ne ) to the end of it, and came up with ( C:\Games\RomeTW.exe-mod:eb -nm -show_err -ne ). I then copied this, and tried to "paste shortcut" to the desktop, but it didn't work. Am I doing something wrong, as far as you can tell? And what is this corrected_regions tga? Where do I find this file?

[jirisys]

No, it doesn't matter at all, just put your own path.
No, first MAKE THE SHORTCUT, then edit the shortcut.
It's a .tga file and it will appear in... .../Activision/Rome - Total War (or your own) as soon as you finish step 3 and 4

~Jirisys (Any more questions)

[Atraphoenix]

1. Delete your map.rwm (.../EB/Data/world/maps/base/ - make a backup)

2. Create a shortcut ".../Activision/Rome - Total War/RomeTW.exe" -mod:eb -nm -show_err -ne note the position of the "

jirisys; if you do not want to make a new shortcut, you can simply delete the map.rwm "FILES" one in "C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\EB\Data\world\maps\base"
the other one is on "C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\EB\sp game edu backup"
if you delete both files trivialscript will show an error but click to continue
EB will open then follow your procedure if you do not delete both map.rwm files when you start EB with trivial script EB will overwrite the new map.rwm file with the one on sp game edu backup folder.

in this way you do not have to create a different shortcut either, do not forget you have to copy the new map rwm file on sp game edu backup folder as well.