Advanced techniques for debug my game crash?

I'm playing a Civ5 BNW hotseat game with a few mods. The mods are nothing fancy, just extra resources and a few diplomacy adjustments. Around turn 250, there is something crashing the game right before one the two human players is about to start his turn. Most of the time the game hangs for a bit and then CTDs. Sometimes, however, the music keeps playing but the game just hangs.

I have enabled logging by editing config.ini. I looked through all the logs but I can't find anything particularly interesting. I have also changed the video settings to minimum without any success. Both versions (DX11, DX9) produce the same crash.

The thing is that by repeatedly reloading and trying to advance I have managed to get the game running for a few more turns. However, it always ends up crashing at some point.

Are there any advanced debugging techniques I could use to zero in on the issue?

I wouldn't call them advanced, but it can narrow things down a bit.

- Check to make sure that your drivers are up to date!!!!!

- To check if it's mods screwing things up (doesn't matter how un-fancy they are, they can still screw up), Turn them all off, if the game still screws up, it's not a mod. If the game doesn't, turn them on individually until you get a failure.
- - Further, if you do get one that causes a failure, make sure that you test the game with ONLY that mod, this tests to see if it's an interaction between mods that's breaking things, or the mod itself.

- If a program does a CTD, usually the Windows Event logger will have some report of the error, you can check there for any "Critical" failures that may have occured at the time.

- Is the failure only in MP HotSeat, or can it be reproduced in an online game? (easily testable)

- Is the failure only in MP, or can it be reporduced in SP

- Are there any other games that are causing crashes, this may indicate a hardware or driver level issue and not a game issue.

These are the few that I can think of off the top of my head. You have to treat a game that you don't have full access to source level code like a black box, you can fiddle the inputs, but you can't mess with the guts.

Also, this thread should probably be in the BNW tech support section instead of BE, it'll probably get better traction there.

@Fr33lanc3r

Thanks for the suggestions. I followed your advance and disabled all the mods. The crash still happens but now it happens when an AI player, China, is about to begin its turn. I enabled the IGE mod to see what would happen if I killed China. Interestingly, I was able to continue the game for several turns with this player dead.

My theory is that an AI player does something stupid that crashes the game. I just can't figure out exactly what. Unfortunately, the net_message_debug.log does not record anything about China except that its turn has started. It seems that the game devs were not smart enough to flush the logs upon an unexpected exception.

Are there any other ways to closely observe what the AI does, ideally step by step? I tried to bring up the console but nothing happens when I presss '~', though I've enabled its 2 settings in config.ini. Perhaps it's not allowed in hotsteat mode?

would you mind explaining how you turned on logging?

@fivetimer,

When a single-player game of Civ 5 crashes, a log file with the extension .mdmp (mini-dump) is created in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V. You need special tools (search for something like how to read mdmp files to read and interpret these files. I don't know if the same is true for hotseat games. The Firaxis developers often request copies of the mdmp files to help them debug crashes.