Need Help to Save a Game

[SirDavid3]

Hi everyone,
There is a game we've been playing for a very long time with a friend, on and off. It's in Hotseat mode and we use the mod AND.
Everything was going great, and as you'd expect we've grown quite attached to the map and the story of the game. Unfortunately after reaching a certain turn there is a Disaster event and the game breaks after. Still runs for a few turns, but can no longer be saved and crashes after.
Is there any way to salvage this. It feels very unfulfilling to have invested so much time and energy and we never get to see the end of that game.
Attached you'll find the save game and a screenshot of the event. I'm also trying to fix the issue in the meanwhile and update here if it's possible at all.

 

[SirDavid3]

A quick update on this. So I tried a few things again, and seems to have made some progress. First I updated to the newest AND mod, but that did nothing unfortunately (I also installed the mega civ pack which I forgot to mention).
After that I tried a few things and I might have discovered something. As It's a hot-seat game I retired one of the players out of curiosity, and voila, the game didn't crash after the event on the next round. Now this doesn't solve the issue just yet, but shows that the other Human player is causing issues. So with the help of a key command I set one players turn to be played by AI for 2 turns without automation and lo and behold it worked. I had no time for more extensive testing, but now it seems to work. (on this second try the event did not even occur, which I find confusing). My guess is that there must have been with the automation, how the event reduces food output on tiles and that must have crashed the Automation. I'm only guessing, but I'm overjoyed that this fixed it.

 

[f1rpo]

Maybe this has been resolved to your satisfaction and there's no need to dig into it further. If you're still looking for a cleaner workaround: I can't quite follow the sequence of events ...

Starting on the turn that the Dark Age popup appears, the game can no longer be saved? (I.e. crashes when trying to save?) And you have a savegame one turn before the popup, and saving still works at that point? Even in that case, I wouldn't feel confident that the Dark Age is the source of the problem – could be, of course.

And your current workaround is to go back to the turn before the Dark Age popup and run AI Auto Play for 2 turns from there? Not sure how this works in AND, but I would expect this to put all human players under AI control. No popup about the Dark Age then (there should be no popups at all during AI Auto Play), but does the turn log (Ctrl+Tab) show the start of the Dark Age? If the Dark Age indeed no longer occurs, that would be strange because the Volcano event sets a deterministic timer for the Dark Age.

Did you try just making some different decisions about unit moves or city production on the turn before the Dark Age popup? Maybe that's already enough to avoid the error. Letting a single unit Auto-Explore (assuming that the unit will actually move as a result and not just skip its turn) should be enough to change the state of the random number generator, leading to differences in (randomized) AI decisions.

You could also report this bug in the AND subforum. There has been a little bit of activity in the bug reports thread this week.

 

[SirDavid3]

Hey f1rpo!
I appreciate you replying this. Although the issue is fixed I didn't consider it settled as I wasn't sure how I got it fixed. Let me try to clear up the sequence. The game had no issues up to the point of the Volcano popup. There are two human players playing hot-seat. Prior to this solution I have tried everything else, just as you recommend. Exploration, different moves, going back to an even earlier save, and nothing. The pop-up comes, after which auto-cycle no longer works. Trying to save the game gives a 'failed to compress' error. I'm still able to end the turn a couple of times but it then crashes, and no save works (including auto save) as none of the solutions work I expected the event to be game breaker.
However retiring one human player caused the event to occur without any hiccups. This made me hopeful again, so using the same player I chose AI auto play for 2 turns without automation. My understanding was that this only applies to one human player. Strangely the popup didn't occur.
I'll however look into the turn log as what you're suggesting makes a lot of sense.

 

[SirDavid3]

I went back to check and the event did not occur.
I tried to recreate the fix and strangely it did not work the first couple of times. The event still happened and the game crashed. But after a few tries it finally moved on to the next turn and the Volcano event did not happen.

 

[f1rpo]

Just based on reading the Python code for the volcano event (applyVolcano1), the eruption is a random event and should be pretty easy to avoid by playing differently or by editing CvRandomEventInterface.py. But once the eruption has occurred and has (secretly) triggered the Dark Age with a randomized delay of 4 to 11 turns, preventing the Dark Age from commencing is difficult. Come to think of it, the eruption could've occurred in some unseen tile, in which case you'd only see the Dark Age popup. Anyway, I assume that going back that many turns isn't an option. How AI Auto Play, sometimes, avoids the Dark Age is a mystery to me. CvGame::doDarkAge looks quite inevitable. Would have to use a debugger to really get to the bottom of this.