Loading saves started to crash game

[Viscount Landgrave]

Greetings!

So i was going to play a game today, but discovered that all three saves i have 57-th+ turn result in game crashing. Does anybody have suggestions for fixing this?

[Roladze]

Hey!
I have the same problem here! The game crashed 2 days ago, and now i am not able to load the saved games, not even the autosave. It's kinda really bad cause i have 60+ hours of gameplay with that nation, and really close to some achievemnts.
I will let you know if i found any solution.

[Viscount Landgrave]

Originally posted by Roladze:

Hey!
I have the same problem here! The game crashed 2 days ago, and now i am not able to load the saved games, not even the autosave. It's kinda really bad cause i have 60+ hours of gameplay with that nation, and really close to some achievemnts.
I will let you know if i found any solution.

Thatnks for response! I googled a little and it seems to be an old problem without any clear methods to restore saves =(

I'll also let u know if i would find something.

[Devil Doug]

Sometimes I can actually recover my game by re-installing from CD-ROM, but most times I can't. Whenever the game crashes during play, I usually find some sort of STEAM update window behind the game window. Saving every ten turns doesn't work either. Multiple saves like auto save & England 1750 does not work. I've found that I have fewer problems when turning off the computer every night, and letting STEAM update when I boot up the next day. Still, you never know when that STEAM advertisement is going to come and open a new window behind you, and that seems to be a bit of a train wreck also. Been playing this game off and on for ten years, and I don't think STEAM really cares if it does work or not - Just pay for it!

[Boss Hogg]

Just the same problem here.... I save really often, about one or TWO saves per turn (before and after battling generally speaking) and all was well, but this morning the game didn't load the last 6 saves. Started again from the save before that, played for a couple of turns and saved three times; then proceeded to shut the game, relaunched it and tried to load the newest saves.... but to no avail. The entity and diversity of problems of ETW is somewhat fascinating.
Anyway, one of the suggested solutions is to copy the save files, uninstall the game completely (a couple of folders do need a manual delete), then reinstall it and then copy back the save files. But for f**k sake I can't seem to be able to locate these files in windows 10... if anyone knows their location it would be greatly appreciated and NO, it's not the hidden appdata folder everyone mentions : I have no Creative Assembly directory, nor any .sav files

"In another post is said to enter %appdata% in the search bar , then locate the Creative Assembly folder and delete the Empire directory there"

[Roladze]

Originally posted by Bonimba:

Just the same problem here.... I save really often, about one or TWO saves per turn (before and after battling generally speaking) and all was well, but this morning the game didn't load the last 6 saves. Started again from the save before that, played for a couple of turns and saved three times; then proceeded to shut the game, relaunched it and tried to load the newest saves.... but to no avail. The entity and diversity of problems of ETW is somewhat fascinating.
Anyway, one of the suggested solutions is to copy the save files, uninstall the game completely (a couple of folders do need a manual delete), then reinstall it and then copy back the save files. But for f**k sake I can't seem to be able to locate these files in windows 10... if anyone knows their location it would be greatly appreciated and NO, it's not the hidden appdata folder everyone mentions : I have no Creative Assembly directory, nor any .sav files

"In another post is said to enter %appdata% in the search bar , then locate the Creative Assembly folder and delete the Empire directory there"

Hey!
I know you said that you have Win10, but it's a really good trick to find that folder. Hope it will help you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtZHYT6PUqE

[Boss Hogg]

Thanks mate !

[Roladze]

Originally posted by Bonimba:

Thanks mate !

You are welcome!
Could you say if you could fix your save files with reinstalling the game please?

[Boss Hogg]

I'm in the reinstall phase now... but, just before uninstalling, I was not able to load any save game, even the one I used last time to try and understand what was happening. I'm really pissed off for I was playing a modded campaign with 4 turns per year... and I was in my 260th turn (out of a total of 400 turns)

[Boss Hogg]

Ok, tests ended but nothing can be done about those save files, they seem to have been corrupted somehow. There's a twist tho.... I'll try to explain just for clarity sake. Let's say I have 100 save files; the first 90 can be accessed and used normally while the last (more recent) 10 are unusable. So I started again from save n°90 and made different choices, attacking another faction, making agreements etc. and saved a few time in the process; then I quit and reload but, as before, all the saves made after file n°90 are "corrupted" and not usable.

Trying an empiric solution I started to think that, maybe, ETW has a bug that manifest itself when the player controls more than a specific number of provinces and since I want all of Europe under my control (for the achievement) I decided to sell some of my american colonies just to lower this hypotetical value.

Saves after N°90 are becoming usable again.

At this point I tried conquering a bunch of russian provinces; five provinces to be precise.
Save, quit, reload.... game crashes.

I go back and try to conquer a province at a time, just like this :

I get Ukraine : save, quit and reload = OK

I get Crimea : save, quit and reload = OK

I get Don Volsko : save, quit and reload = OK

I get Ingria : save, quit and reload = OK

I get Galizia(Galicia) and Podolia : save, quit and reload = Crash to desktop

Ok I have hit the limit... no more provinces after this point.

I try some other things and leave only Galizia&Podolia alone, but :

I get Milan : save, quit and reload = OK

I get Corsica : save, quit and reload = OK .... .....

I get Genoa : save, quit and reload = OK .... ..... what the heck...

and so to make a short story even shorter (and just to strenghten the vastity of unstableness that this game is ) my game\my campaign seems to have a bug regardin the province of Galizia and Podolia.. when I conquer it the game continues to function but every savegame files made AFTER conquering it gets corrupted...

I think I can work around it just to end this campaign... I'm just sorry I can't help anyone

*EDIT yep, it's confirmed, the Galizia & Podolia province is bugged for me. Every save made after conquering the city is corrupted.
meh.
By the way, I'm playing with Venice, 4 turns per year using the Minor Factions Revenge MOD

[Rebelsoul]

its a common problem its really sad becease i like the game but i never got past 80 turns ,why do they not fix it if so much people have the same problem

[Boss Hogg]

It really is a shame.. even still, I consider Empire one of the top 3 TW games, along with Medieval1 and Rome1

[SirAMovesALot]

Save at the end of every turn.

[bigguy58]

I save at the end of every turn. Sometimes you have to back up one, two, or even three turns. This can be a pain if you've just won a long naval battle where you were outnumbered and outgunned and have a lot of captures that you may not get the next time around. But it has yet to fail me. Currently playing as Dagestan, and it crashed once on me. Went back a turn and everything worked fine. It actually helped in that case, because the doggone Marathans had just attacked me and taken Egypt in the game that froze. I was better prepared the second time around and held them off (destroyed their pesky infantry - those guys are TOUGH).

[Kalianteri]

I have the same problem and the only way I could continue my campaign was to load the latest save that worked. Went from 1780 to 1765 -_-

[Boss Hogg]

Glad to see ETW still killing save files after all these years