GAME CRASHES WHEN TRYING TO LOAD AUTOSAVES - Unreal Engine Crash

[TrashPanda]

So i encountered the dreaded unreal engine has crashed bug. Here is what i noticed at first
- It happened after year 11.
- every time after loading the last save of the game, would crash after 60 seconds.
- Happened right after i got my first additional region (i work slow)
I tried all the suggestions on this forum but nothing worked. So today i loaded an older safe of the same game/run at an earlier phase (year 8) and to my surprise it worked just fine. I got way past year 11, and things were going fine. But while playing with the volume off and not paying attention of any dangers i noticed i was being raided in one of my regions. I decided to cheat and safe spam, so i clicked on the last auto save and the game instantly crashed. Then i tried my last manual save and to my surprise it worked just fine. and its way past year 13.
I know its a long shot and I know its a long story, but I think that the autosave files have a bug.
Any suggestions on what this might be or how to fix?

[CatPerson]

This may not have anything to do with anything, but I ran the game since release without any crashes. On the save with the highest population number, a few days ago, I finally did get a ue engine notice CTD. I then started to get them occasionally on other saves.

I went into the appdata folder where the saves are. There's a folder with all those crash reports. I deleted the contents.

Haven't had a crash since, even in that large population save.

Not saying that folder is the actual cause of the original crash, but perhaps once it happens once, something corrupted in one of those report folders or even the crash reporting system and causes more issues. Don't know for sure tho.

Edit: I've also noticed increased lag with large towns during auto-save. So it's possible something goes wrong during auto-save at times, hence the CTD. eg, you could try it without autosave on and just manual save instead, see if it improves anything over time.