Save Game Files Exceeding 100GB (Each)

[lgvereor]

Recently (after BNW) I have encountered an issue with my game freezing up upon load, after looking around for a solution I found someone saying to delete the autosave folder, I did, and it worked. I noticed I also had a drop in used disk space that was exponential, I thought Steam deleted or updated some games. Today I noticed the samew freezing issue, deleted the folder again, but then decided to undelete and look at the size. 250GB. One save was over 100GB alone, others 50GB, but the most recent save (same game as the 100GB) was only 7MB.

What is going on here?

 

[FeiLing]

This is awesome. Sorry I can't help (this issue seems very unique and we didn't have that before ever) other than saying: try to verify the game cache within steam and eventually reinstall the game if that doesn't help.

 

[timtofly]

Did you actually verify that the OS recognized the size discrepancy under available Drive space when you deleted those files?

I think there was a slight problem like that when Civ5 first came out, but not on that size scale.

 

[lgvereor]

I am still getting this problem after a complete reinstall, only 20 turns in and my saves are sometimes 5+ gigabytes. It's completely random even, one save will be only a few MB, the next several GB, then the one after a few MB again, like somehow an extra several GB was added into a save that disappeared the next save.

It's made my game completely unplayable.

 

[Petek]

A thread that contains information about the previous problem with bloated save files may be found here. However, as noted by timtofly, your problem is several orders of magnitude greater.

Perhaps your Windows file system has been corrupted. I suggest that you scan for file system errors, preferably while some of those large saves are still present.

(If you don't know how to do so, open Windows Explorer, right-click on your C: drive and select Properties. In the Tools tab, click on Check now. Under the options, select Automatically fix file system errors (but don't select the other option) and then start. Then select Schedule disk check. Restart your PC. The process takes several minutes.)

Afterwords, are the large save files still the same size? Are new save files still large?

 

[lgvereor]

The saves are the same size, I even transferred them to another computer and checked, and it took awhile to do so.

I have actually located the exact cause/problem, at least in my case, it's a side effect of another known bug, "Processing Barbarian Turn" crashes, or in my case freezes, and it's not just Barbarians, it's whatever was the last turn, so if Barbarians are turned off, it's City States, if there are no City States, then it will be Processing Egypt or whoever was the last civ to move.

The game freezes abruptly, all animation stops except for the globe cursor, on the last turn, and it seems to just get worse. The longer I let the game sit in this frozen state, the larger the file gets. A few seconds equals roughly 2GB, walking away to get a tea costs me 100GB of hard drive space. The game is practically unplayable now. The game worked fine before BNW.

 

[lgvereor]

For what it's worth, though it's practically useless since I know the damn game worked several months ago on the same machine.

------------------
System Information
------------------
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
Display Memory: 4095 MB

 

[lgvereor]

Also I should note that the freezing/bloating occurs only on autosaves/turns. If I turn off autosave, it doesn't help any, and it just freezes up without the bloating. Firaxis must be taking developing lessons from Bethesda, I feel like I'm back to Skyrim.

 

[lgvereor]

This problem is still plaguing me, I found something, but I can't find one solution that actually works outside of turning off saves, barbarians, and city razing and playing it all in one playthrough. Not a sensible option. I've asked Valve, Firaxis, I've even installed it on a different computer with a different build except for both being Win7 and both do the same.

I was wrong, this isn't Skyrim all over again, this is worse. At least Bethesda gives me a generic log that sometimes points me in a general direction, this however is me driving blind uphill in slush during a sleet storm. I had no problems whatsoever before BNW, not one, now I can't play at all.

 

[timtofly]

If you could post a normal save before an abnormal one perhps some one could play a couple of turns. The only thing else could be your steam account itself. Maybe try deleting steam from your computer, and re-load steam. Avoid cloud saves.

 

[Petek]

In addition to timtofly's suggestion, what happens if:

1. You disable BNW in the DLC option off the main menu. Does this fix the problem?
2. You compress (zip) one of the giant save files. What is the size both before and after compressing? Normal save files compress by about 75%. If you get much higher compression, that might tell us something.

 

[lgvereor]

I solved the problem, I think. Turns out it was a (corrupted?) mod file, virus maybe? The mod is called Diplomacy Values (BNW). Here's where it gets weird, and ominous of a virus. I didn't have it turned on, I didn't even have it in the MODS folder, it was in a MODSBACKUP folder I used to make sure my mods aren't deleted from the offline "glitch", where the game deletes mods you had installed sometimes after putting Steam in offline mode.

This mod appears to bloat my games with "empty" data, and cause critical errors, infinite loads, ect even when not turned on or in the mod folder. When I reinstalled, and when I even tried the other PC, I coincidentally opted to DL all my mods, while keeping them turned off, because I assumed the issue wouldn't be mod related if they were turned the hell off.

Only after I took my friends advice in moving all mods out of the Civ V folders and sub folders, did I notice it was gone, so I tried every mod, one at a time and sure enough this is the mod that appears to be causing it, I even deleted and redownloaded, and it still did it. I don't know if the mod has a virus or what, but now I have to give up one of my favorite mods.

I'm still in the "testing" phase of deciding whether this is the culprit, but I'm on day FOUR of the same saved game with no issues yet, prior to this, I was lucky to get a few hours in before problems occurred. This also explains why when I played a Vanilla game, and saved it, then loaded, it always crashed, just like how when you try loading a modded game in the vanilla load screen.

I don't know what to make of this, I even scanned it with AVG/Malwarebytes, nothing. I'm stumped. Thank you all for trying to help, I'll update this on Sunday after a weeks of play, if it works still then, it's pretty certain I've found the culprit, even if it doesn't make any damn sense.