Post patch 1.3 Bug List

[Zorbane]

Got another one.

Pirate and Great Britain fleet stacked together in the Straights of Madagascar. Both raiding the trade route. I am unable to attack the pirate fleet (I end up clicking on Great Britain instead).

More info

Great Britain has been raiding that route for a long time, and obviously I am not at war with them or this wouldn't be an issue.

I can actually click on the pirate fleet as the two fleets are perpedicular to each other (they look like an X...) but the cursor doens't change to an attack cursor when I go over the pirate fleet, only the GB one.

[Karash]

Still seems like the AI is incapable of defending their home port. Anyone else agree?

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Got another one.

Pirate and Great Britain fleet stacked together in the Straights of Madagascar. Both raiding the trade route. I am unable to attack the pirate fleet (I end up clicking on Great Britain instead).

More info

Great Britain has been raiding that route for a long time, and obviously I am not at war with them or this wouldn't be an issue.

I can actually click on the pirate fleet as the two fleets are perpedicular to each other (they look like an X...) but the cursor doens't change to an attack cursor when I go over the pirate fleet, only the GB one.

As a quick fix, see if you can tempt the pirates away. Get a single weak ship in the ZOC of the pirates, with your fleet positioned nearby. With a bit of luck the pirates fall for it and engage the lone ship. With your fleet nearby entering the battle too, your problem should go away.

[hoof]

100% reliable CTD. Playing as Maratha. Mughal spawned two separate fleets, one with a sloop, another with a brig. I build two sloops (in separate ports). I engage the enemy ships, as soon as the sails deploy, CTD. Every single time. I've tried engaging both (with one in range of the other. I've engaged single vs single, for both the enemy sloop or the enemy brig. I've cranked the graphics settings down to the lowest setting, as well as the highest (I run with the highest settings). No difference, CTD.

I have 1.3, with the hotfix (Steam says I'm up to date, current date is 7/10/09).

I have a savegame. If a Creative Assembly developer wants it, I can email it to them. It looks like it's around 14meg .zip-ed.

This bug is really annoying, since I prefer to fight my sea battles myself than autoresolve. I never had a crash while playing the Independance campaign, but i never used a sloop by itself in battle. I'll try using a brig in the future (or a 6th rate or better). Hopefully I'll actually be able to fight naval fights in this campaign.

[hoof]

Ok, now this naval battle crash is really starting to tick me off. The Mysore stabbed me in the back. No problem, I was expecting this. However, their fleet blockaded my capitol province port on their backstab strike. This had the effect of almost completely eliminating my trade income, which resulted in bankruptcy. No problem. I have a three-ship fleet of sloops and they have two brigs, I can handily crush them in naval combat. Oh no, because the game crashes every stinking time I try to run this battle. So I'm forced to auto-resolve which a) doesn't kill them (but they do run away), and b) cripples my fleet (lost two sloops, the third in bad shape). Now I:

a) have no money to fix the sloop or build a decent navy
b) the auto-resolve decided that the two enemy ships got away, so they're at large. If they blockade again, I have nothing to throw at them.

So I think, no problem, in 4 turns I can crush the Mysores in land battle, which will solve the naval problem. Next turn comes up, a third Mysore ship blockades the port, so again, no trade income, and again no way to build a fleet that can autoresolve them (not that it would matter as they'd just get away). Also, I managed to take one of their provinces, and am 2 turns away from the other one (they captured Portugal's province earlier). So in a few turns all will be well, right?

Oh wait a minute, why are my units at half-strength? Yes, half my entire army evaporated. Oh, so I lose soldiers when in bankruptcy? Ok, that's the final straw. My empire is crumbling and I can't do anything about it all because of a flippin' CTD bug that prevents me from preserving my sea trade.

This is fricking ridiculous, I can't wage a proper naval battle because I'm forced to autoresolve or face CTD. Losing because of bad choices, or because of being outmaneuvered/outnumbered/outgunned is one thing, losing because of a crash is very different.

I'm going to try to back up a few turns (and lose a couple hours of playtime) to try to build my fleet of brigs this time, and hopefully those won't cause the crash. If not, I'm going to shelve ETW and go play something else, until the next patch comes out.

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Ok, just tried again with brigs. Same thing, CTD. I'm done with this campaign (and ETW probably) until this gets resolved. Gonna try to replicate this CTD in the stand-alone battles, see if it's the weather or something.

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Managed to isolate the offending parameter. If the winds are gale-force, the CTD occurs, regardless of the ship match-up. The reason I hadn't run into this before is because I never got gale-force winds in the Independence campaign. Just before the CTD, a band of the water, right about at the mipmap transition, darkens, then CTD. Gonna try to see if I can disable features to prevent the CTD. My system is an AMD Phenom II 940, with an ATI Radeon 4870 with 1gb memory, and version 9.6 of the drivers. OS is Vista x64, up to date. Will update as I get more info.

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Ok, swapped my ATI card with an Nvidia 8800GT. Same crash. Swapped my system memory with memory from another computer. Same crash. I suspect this isn't a driver issue, or a memory issue based on those two tests. Next up is to see if it's just gale-force winds or other winds that yield the CTD.

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Tried other winds, it's only the gale-force wind which causes the CTD. Oh, and as an added bonus, when I swapped my DDR2 8500 memory with DDR 6400, the motherboard locked in the 800Mhz mode, and won't go back to 1066Mhz for the DDR2 8500 memory now, no matter what I do in the bios. I'll try pulling the CMOS battery to see if that will clear whatever state it's in, but I love that I might have lost 20% memory bandwidth trying to track this down :(

Next up is looking through the exposed data files to see if I can mod-out gale force winds from the game. If I can do that, then I'll be back in business.

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Final update (for now). Resetting the CMOS on my motherboard fixed the memory issue (yay!). As far as modding the game to not have fights in gale-force winds, I've posted a question in the Mods forum, as a quick glance at the data files tells me I'd have some serious learning to do to even attempt this on my own. Hopefully someone will be able to help me figure out how to turn off gale-force winds.

[hoof]

I found a work-around. Using the pack file editor, I opened up the seasurfaces.pack file, and made the wind_level_4_sea and wind_level_4_swell parts a copy of the level_3 parts. Now the game no longer crashes! It looks like whatever was cratering me was in the wind_level_4 data. Hopefully this only affects the visuals, which I can live with :) Now, time to crush that Mysore fleet =)

[Zenicetus]

Something new after last night's Steam hotfix:

I haven't had any CTD problems before, but now I get a consistent CTD every time I try to go to the singleplayer Campaign screen to start a new campaign. I can click the "Continue" button and it will load a current game and I can play it fine, but it CTD's every time I try to reach that screen to start a new campaign.

I guess this game goes on the shelf until the next hotfix or patch.

[Zenicetus]

Okay, I fixed the CTD on the screen for starting a new singleplayer campaign. Looking around on the .com forum, I found a suggestion to delete the /empire folder in the path (for Win XP):

/Documents and Settings/(username)/Application Data/The Creative Assembly/Empire

That fixed the CTD. This will also delete your savegames, so be careful. Apparently you can get a corrupted file somewhere in that directory tree. Others have reported this happening before the recent hotfix, so it's either part of the 1.3 patch, or it goes back even further, and I just didn't manage to get the corrupted file until very recently.