Potential solution to late-game crashing when capturing cities

[callan]

Hi guys,

I had this issue on my very first game and I abandoned it 349 turns in. It had been a pretty experimental play through anyway so I quickly forgot and moved on.

Today though as I was looking through saves for a civ with a great work to steal, for the achievement, I loaded this up again and remembered why I stopped it. I had later found out that this crash was often caused by spies being present in a captured/razed city. So I took a look at the unit list I didn't even know existed at the time and saw this:

Absalom is shown as an agent with a free action but he is not present anywhere on the board. If you select him you see the following:

This agent is apparently stuck. If I capture any city while he is still in my unit list the game will crash. But if I press the + and delete him, I can immediately capture a city and all is fine. I attach the relevant save game as proof that this will work for at least some people with this crash. Hopefully this can save some games for some folks.

 

[Underseer]

Interesting observation.

 

[snoochems]

Interesting. I have a game stuck at turn 300ish - but it crashes on the AIs turn. I wonder if this is the same issue but caused by the AI.

 

[callan]

Interesting. I have a game stuck at turn 300ish - but it crashes on the AIs turn. I wonder if this is the same issue but caused by the AI.

Check your own unit list and see if you have a stuck spy. If not then it is possible an AI spy is stuck instead.

 

[Thanatios]

Thank you very much for your work.

How about the AI? Can the AI cause this problem?

If so, is there a way to find out which civ is having this problem by looking in the save file, swap to that civ, delete the unit, and go back to your own civ?

 

[callan]

I was able to test that the AI can cause the crashing part by leaving my spy stuck and advancing that save file for a long time until the AIs went to war and someone, somewhere managed to cap a city.

I do not know if this can be caused by an AI spy getting stuck but I imagine it could. I'm not sure how easy it would be fix by save file editing though as these files are never plain text and are rarely easy to edit without breaking.