crash to desktop on end-turn on turn 1225

[aemer]

Here's the short:

I'm running BTS with nextwar mod, and I changed the autosave frequency to be every turn. I'm playing the ice age map as a custom scenario, as japan, and I'm up to turn 1225, fairly run-of-the-mill settings all around I should think. It's the steam version I'm using, bought 2 weeks ago. I hit end turn, bam, it seems to get about halfway through the ai's turn, then bam, crash to desktop. HELP! I want to finish my game

Here's the long:

I play a game of civ (2 thru 4) every year or two, latest version, all expansions and maybe a mod of some kind, on an earth map. I like civ the most when it's really epic in size; unfortunately, that means a single game can easily take me 40 hours...and for that reason, I don't play that often.

This time, I've gone for a marathon game, on noble difficulty. You can probably understand my frustration with having my game cut short when all that's left is grabbing the final victory; so please, I implore you good civizens, help me! I've no idea if I've followed the proper procedures on this forum for submitting my plea; I tried searching for about 20 minutes and I got diddly squat for it, though that may be because I haven't looked in the right places, so if so, I'm sorry, but i don't know what else to do.

 

[ori]

Welcome to CFC

is there an error message when it crashes?

 

[aemer]

Thanks for the welcom

Nothing...sound disappears, then picture...the process apparently self-destructs.

I tried going back 15 turns a couple of times, changing things up, nothing helped. Including stopping all my workers and switching my cities to produce wealth...

So, it has to be some sort of event that isn't directly related to those things... I don't recall if I used new random seeds upon loading, but if i didn't, I suppose there could be something there....

But yeah, my guess is an event that occurs on that specific turn, and it does something, god knows what, and it crashes the game.

You think there's a chance of saving that save somehow ? =P

 

[ori]

I just loaded it and it does two things:
it fires a host of python exception warnings when debugging is enabled - but they do not crash the game, though they show that there is something buggy in the code - then on end turn the game crashes with a generic windows error report, that unfortunately doesn't help. I did not check - but did you use the no modified assets setting when you set up the game? if not I might try to figure out whats wrong when I have some time over the weekend (no guarantees though ).

 

[aemer]

Uh...uhm...I don't recall setting or not setting such a thing

What would that setting do? Can I check somehow to see if I set it, now?

Also, thanks for loading up the game and testing it out! At least that tells me it's not my system.

 

[ori]

you would have had to check it in the custom game setup the option is lock modified assets and prevents among other things the use of the worldbuilder.
That said, I unfortunately did not have time to play around with it - but really the only way to get around such a crash is brute force in going into worldbuilder and starting to delete stuff - usually these crashes are due to something happening with another civilization - and one might be able to narrow it down, but that takes some fiddling.
If I recall correctly this is with the next war mod? if so unfortunately its not actively maintained as far as I know since its a Firaxis mod

 

[aemer]

Thanks for getting back to me!

I remember that option...I didn't check it, thinking that I might need the worldbuilder for something.

If what you're suggesting is the way this type of bug is most commonly solved, then I would go about it by popping into the worldbuilder from within the game and basically I'd need to delete almost all of the other civilisations, see if that solves it...if it does, I would go back, delete less, see if the problem is still solved, to try and narrow the problematic bit down... yes?

If this is the case, I should be able to give it a go myself...assuming the world builder is not too hard too difficult to use. I'm a computer scientist by trade so I might not be entirely useless with this =P

EDIT: And yes, I'm playing with the nextwar mod on...it's right there on the boxart, I really thought it would just work, not that it would actually be _less stable_ than using a community mod :'(

 

[ori]

main thing with the firaxis mods (note some of the mods that come with the game, like Fall from Heaven and Rhye's of Civilization are orignally community mods and are actively supported) is that they only receive bug fixes with the larger patches to the core game - and even there the bugfixes were not terribly many. In contrast to these the community mods that are actively maintained (like Rhye's or FfH) tend to have many more releases and are more actively looking for bugs - that is the reason why they tend to either be more stable or at least have someone here on the forums who can look into the matter and if its a genuine bug provide a fix (the Firaxis people couldn't provide a new code based fix for anything unless it goes through all the official channels.

That said: what I would try is: go into worldbuilder and delete some players (if you delete all at the same time you'll win by conquest ) - this is best done by deleting all the cities a player has - the units will then be auto-killed. If I troubleshoot a save like this I tend to kill half of the players first - see if it helps, if it does I kill less, if it doesn't I kill the other half - if it still persists, its more complex and I usually just give up