Game hangs/crashes, and savegame gets corrupt!

[Hanzaplast]

Hi there,

So basicly what the title sais. I create a singleplayer game (not tutorial), and when its loaded, I found my first city and then immediatly save the game. When I exit the game and check windows explorer, I see the save game, it has a size of approx. 440kb.

When starting the game, and loading the save game, its notaceble corrupted. All the tiles are replaced with ocean tiles, and I cannot issue any move command or choose a new production in a city. When I hit Escape and click exit to Windows, the game hangs and I have to force-kill it with Windows Task manager.

Things I've already done:

- Verify integrity of game cache;
- Reinstall the entire game;
- Reinstall Steam and then the game;
- Purchased the 2 DLC's since I read somewhere that only in the DLC's they patched certain bugs. Clearly to no avail in my case.;
- Tried the game in DirectX 9 mode.

Also, when I enable steam cloud save, and I try to save to Steam, its also an instant-hang.

I'm playing with NO mods, with a pretty clean Windows 8.1 x64 machine with the latest drivers for everything, including graphics card drivers.


In order to show you precisely what I mean I've made a video with my phone and uploaded it to YouTube, see here: http://youtu.be/wmvLxTzkB9U
Video has just been uploaded so HD quality will be available soon.

I've kept it raw & simple so you can see exactly what I'm doing.


Anyone has any ideas why this is happening? Because this is utter crap, I simply cannot play a singleplayer or host a multiplayer match this way, because EVERY save, be it in turn 1 or 300, gets corrupted.

[Zer0]

Some common causes I've seen of corrupted files are: bad RAM, unstable overclocks, bad HDD.

First thing I'd do is restore default frequencies if you're overclocking then do a couple hours of memtest+.

[Hanzaplast]

Originally posted by Zer0:

Some common causes I've seen of corrupted files are: bad RAM, unstable overclocks, bad HDD.

First thing I'd do is restore default frequencies if you're overclocking then do a couple hours of memtest+.

Hi, thx for the fast reply. I currently don't have anything overclocked. My RAM, well, it's plausible, but wouldn't I be seeing similar bugs/issues with other games and/or programs?
I'll run Memtest86+ regardless overnight.
My SSD seems to be fine, I just ran some checks with Samsung Magician, and all seems well.

[Zer0]

Another suggestion is to clear out the Civ V folder in My Documents and start fresh as something in there could be causing the corruption like the cache files.

Go to "\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civ V" and delete everything in there (save files are stored here also). Do a Verify game cache integrity just to make sure everything is installed correctly and run Civ again. It will rebuild all necessary files but your game options will be reset to default.

[Hanzaplast]

Originally posted by Zer0:

Another suggestion is to clear out the Civ V folder in My Documents and start fresh as something in there could be causing the corruption like the cache files.

Go to "\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civ V" and delete everything in there (save files are stored here also). Do a Verify game cache integrity just to make sure everything is installed correctly and run Civ again. It will rebuild all necessary files but your game options will be reset to default.

Ok, so I ran memtest86+ overnight, it ran 12 hours and did 7 passes with 0 errors.
Then I started AIDA64 stresstest, which ran for almost 4 hours, and didnt crash or gave errors. In the graph I saw that my CPU temperatures didn't went higher than 42 degrees Celsius.

I will try your suggestion and clear out that folder and check again. In the meantime I'm going to install this game on my 2nd PC and see what it does there.

[Hanzaplast]

OK I solved the problem!


I don't know exactly what the problem was but it had something to do with a corrupted save game (probably from Steam sync) that caused my system to somehow corrupt all save games.

What I did was, I installed the game on a second system I have which is pretty clean and it has NEVER had Civ V installed on it. I launched it, started a game and saved it (local, on disk). Then I exited the game, started it again and I wanted to load the game to see if that worked. I got that Runtime exception error (which has to to with steam cloud saves AFAIK). So I tried deleting all steam cloud saves with the tutorial on internet, but it didnt help.

Then I started a new game, and saved it to EVERY available steam cloud save slot. And also a couple of times local. I exited the game and let Steam sync (upload) the saves. When that was done I started the game again (mind you, im still talking about my 2nd system here), and I was able to enter the 'Load game' screen! And I was also able to load both the local savegames as the steam cloud savegames. So at that point I at least had a stable situation on my 2nd system.

I then copied the local savegames from my 2nd system to my main system. I started steam (which began downloading all that steam cloud saves which I uploaded from my 2nd system), and started the game. I could enter the 'Load game' screen, and I loaded the local save I just copied from my 2nd system. And it wasn't corrupted!! I then played some turns, and saved it locally. Exited the game, started game, and loaded that savegame. Was not corrupted!

Then I started a whole new game (on my main system still), and saved it both locally and on Steam cloud. I exited the game, started it again, and I could load both the local savegame as the cloud savegame.

So FOR NOW, it seems to work again. :)