Civ 6 on Switch always crashes when trying to save post turn ~600.

Zelwindin

Chieftain
Joined
Feb 6, 2020
Messages
3
Greetings all,

I am posting this here to try and draw attention to a game breaking bug on the Switch version of Civilization 6.

I have been in touch with 2k support for a couple weeks now trying to figure out why my campaigns always crash on specific turns once I've gotten past turn 600 or so. Now, after messing around with the game settings and repeating the bug on 3 separate campaigns, I have figured out what is causing the crash.

Specifically, saving the game is causing the crashes. If I change auto-save to 100 turns, I can proceed past the turn where the game would hang up and crash every time. However, I cannot manually save the game after this specific turn. The game will always crash when trying to manually save.

To better explain in case anyone is not following, here is a breakdown of what's happening.

I've reproduced the bug in 3 separate campaigns. Please note that each campaign uses a different random seed for the map generation:

Huge world size, 20 civs, 24 city states, marathon speed, Fractal map, Teddy Roosevelt as the leader: Game always crashes on turn 642.

Huge world size, 20 civs, 24 city states, marathon speed, Islands map, Ghandi as the leader: Game always crashes on turn 624.

Huge world size, 20 civs, 24 city states, marathon speed, Islands map, Qin Shi Huang as the leader: Game always crashes on turn 614.

If I change the auto-save feature in the game's options from the default (save every 3 turns) to save every 100 turns, I can pass the turns where the game always crashes. The game runs perfectly fine. However, the moment I try to manually save on ANY TURN past the specific turn mentioned above, the game will always crash.

I'd like to note as well that no faction is nearing victory. As I've said, the game can continue past the specific turn with auto-saves changed, so I can say definitively that there is no "victory on the next turn" bug in play. I'd also like to note that declaring war on factions does nothing to fix this bug. I have literally tried declaring war on every faction and city state at once. Nothing changes.

Furthermore, I have reproduced this bug on two separate switch consoles (my own, and my girlfriend's). The first two campaigns were on my switch, the third was on hers. The bug still occurs in exactly the same fashion. Therefore I think it's safe to conclude a faulty switch console is not the issue.

I can only guess that the save file size is getting too large or some such for the switch to process (and no, my switch is not lacking space, unless 1 save file is larger than 20 gigabytes, which I very highly doubt is the case).
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At any rate, I hope this post somehow grabs the attention of the development team. If you are a switch civ 6 player, please be aware of this bug; if you are a fan of epic grand strategy campaigns as I am, I do not recommend playing any sort of campaign past turn 600, as I imagine you soon will hit this bug and your campaign will become unplayable.
 
For now it might be good idea to play smaller games. It might be just too much for the Switch or something. I play on smaller maps, and have avoided this possible crashing so far. Not sure if this is the solution, but it works for me. There are similar problems with the iPad version too with the expansions it seems, so its possible they are investigating these kind of problems already.
 
I've just had almost the exact same experience. My first epic speed/huge map game. On turn 368, it tries to autosave and crashes every time. I try a regular save and it crashes every time. For some reason, quick save still works but I'm worried that it will start failing as well. I've changed autosave to every 100 turns for now and hoping I can keep going with just quick save (although it's making me nervous). I had just settled a new city (my 21st city). Maybe that extra city pushed it over the edge. I had been crashing more and more frequently before this started happening. It was originally crashing once every 30 40 turns in early/mid game but as it went on, they started happening more often. Right before this, I was crashing every 2 or 3 turns (some of that was probably the autosave crash).

Has anyone heard of a fix for this yet? I'm gonna try to clear cache and re-install but I'm not hopeful.

Edited to add:
I re-installed and cleared the cache. Still crashing.
Now on turn 371 and the quick save has started crashing as well. There is literally no way for me to save this game any more. All those hours and plans are now wasted. How is this issue still around at this point?
 
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Hello. I also had the same problem. The game became unplayable because everytime i saved manually or on autosave it would crash.

Civ support didn’t help much.

After trial and error I found out the game doesn’t save if you setup autosave to “ALL” in the options.
Next, you have to create a 2K account and link it to your switch. From there on out just save your game to the “Multiplatform Cloud”. That worked for me.

I’m on turn 900, save often because the game crashes occasionally, but not when i save the game.

Hope that helps!
 
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Good info. I wish I had tried that last week. I had already deleted my manual saves because I thought they were corrupted. Then I started a new game without thinking and it over-wrote my autosaves and quicksave. Now I have no saves left of my old game.
 
Good info. I wish I had tried that last week. I had already deleted my manual saves because I thought they were corrupted. Then I started a new game without thinking and it over-wrote my autosaves and quicksave. Now I have no saves left of my old game.

Bad luck, but in these cases deleting the old files (from maybe previous versions) can sometimes help. I would've probably tried the same solution.
 
Hopped back on to see if any solution had been found, and noticed there's been some posts!

Going to try out your suggestion Lamadave, thank you very much for posting this. Would love to be able to play some Civ 6 again, hurrah!

Best of luck to everyone, I hope his suggestions works for you all. I will check back in once I've seen how things turn out.
 
Lamadave, your suggestion worked for me as well! Thanks again for posting, I can finally play the grand campaign I bought the game for. Now, if only the devs would fix the switch issue so I can turn auto-save back on...
 
Made an account to tell you guys I had the same bug. Is there a fix yet? My current campaign is huge map, archipelago, Zulu and Norway coop online game speed. It started crashing at turn 99. I tried your workaround Lamadave and it works. As soon as I turned off autosave the game loads instantly. The only problem I now have is I was playing a multi-player coop game (Zulu, Norway) and it looks like cloud saving for multi-player is not supported.
 
I'm having the problem on standard map and speed. It is very frustrating. I hit turn 300 (because my win condition was failing I switched to domination). I'm literally 2 turns from winning and it keeps crashing and takes like 10 minutes to reload the game and another 10 to end turn. This is ridiculous.
 
I'm having the problem on standard map and speed. It is very frustrating. I hit turn 300 (because my win condition was failing I switched to domination). I'm literally 2 turns from winning and it keeps crashing and takes like 10 minutes to reload the game and another 10 to end turn. This is ridiculous.
My advice to you is to stop playing. The game is unplayable on any campaign that's a decent size because eventually you cannot finish. These glitches have all been known since at least late 2019 if I am correct. It is almost June 2020. Zero excuses from the developer. The game shouldn't be played.
 
I'm having the problem on standard map and speed. It is very frustrating. I hit turn 300 (because my win condition was failing I switched to domination). I'm literally 2 turns from winning and it keeps crashing and takes like 10 minutes to reload the game and another 10 to end turn. This is ridiculous.

Strange - on standard I've had no major issues. A few crashes over my 300 hours on the Switch. But no problem on a reload and the continued play, well apart from slow load- and turn times.
 
Seems more stable post patch 1.2.3

One thing 2K suggested back in december was deleting old saves and limiting saves generally.
So I've backed up my winning saves to the cloud, and keep around 7 saves plus 2 autosaves (you can set autosaves from 3 down to 2 or 1)
 
It's happening again and now turn 200. Just this morning update the game and start send me the error or frozen the screen.

It's any hope for this game on switch ?
 
Hello. I also had the same problem. The game became unplayable because everytime i saved manually or on autosave it would crash.

Civ support didn’t help much.

After trial and error I found out the game doesn’t save if you setup autosave to “ALL” in the options.
Next, you have to create a 2K account and link it to your switch. From there on out just save your game to the “Multiplatform Cloud”. That worked for me.

I’m on turn 900, save often because the game crashes occasionally, but not when i save the game.

Hope that helps!
I'm going to try that!! I already try few things so hope that works for me
 
Well lads, I've reached turn 1156 on my Huge Continents map as Japan with 24 Civs and 0 City-States. Unfortunate as this is the whole reason I play this game. I thought turning on Quick Movement/Combat would help a bit, but it only prevents the inevitable.
 
Hello. I also had the same problem. The game became unplayable because everytime i saved manually or on autosave it would crash.

Civ support didn’t help much.

After trial and error I found out the game doesn’t save if you setup autosave to “ALL” in the options.
Next, you have to create a 2K account and link it to your switch. From there on out just save your game to the “Multiplatform Cloud”. That worked for me.

I’m on turn 900, save often because the game crashes occasionally, but not when i save the game.

Hope that helps!
Hello. I also had the same problem. The game became unplayable because everytime i saved manually or on autosave it would crash.

Civ support didn’t help much.

After trial and error I found out the game doesn’t save if you setup autosave to “ALL” in the options.
Next, you have to create a 2K account and link it to your switch. From there on out just save your game to the “Multiplatform Cloud”. That worked for me.

I’m on turn 900, save often because the game crashes occasionally, but not when i save the game.

Hope that helps!


Ive had the save issue on every game I've played, I haven't been able to complete one play through.

I tried your method Lamadave, and it worked for a few turns, but now when I try to save onto the 2k cloud, it does not save. Or when I manage to somehow get it to say it's saved, it disapears when I go to the load screen.

I'm pretty tired of this game breaking bug, there seems to be no solution, and the developers of the game seem to have no interest in fixing it, even though it's a problem widely repeated by others on the internet, and even cross platform.
 
Same here as of January 2022. Standard map size with 15 civs in 3 different playthroughs does not go past turn 673. Saving is the issue that makes it crash. I know this thread might be dead but has anyone got a fix for this or tried to get a refund? I'm going to try and contact the makers of the game and ask for my money back. This is complete bs.
 
It’s April 2023, still the same issue. This is ridiculous. Why have a game going for 6 years and not fix the bugs? Trash.
And yes I’ve tried all the fake fixes Nintendo and the game came out with. None of it works fyi… just pretending to give a damn
 
It’s April 2023, still the same issue. This is ridiculous. Why have a game going for 6 years and not fix the bugs? Trash.
And yes I’ve tried all the fake fixes Nintendo and the game came out with. None of it works fyi… just pretending to give a damn
Have you try Lamadave advice?

Change setting for "autosave" to "ALL"
then try save your game in "multiplatform cloud" before it reach turn that lead to error.
Load your game from "multiplatform"

It works for me!
 
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