Back to desktop bug with Gret Britain 1600-1615

[ivankecman]

Hi all. Never been on a forum of any kind ever, but I hit a wall and need help, or explanation. So, playing England in Grand Campaign, I formed Grat Britain rather early, have all British Isles, Orkneys, Iceland, parts of Denmark, Antwerp, Calais, Gascogne, all of Northern America, most of Southern America, all sub-saharan Africa, most of the Indian subcontinent and some minor stuff like Fiji, Samoa, Timor, etc. Money is flowing, enemies are crushed every time, fleet is huge. State religion is protestant, all the other (reform.catholic.hindu.muslim etc) are all converted to less than 10%. Bad boy was sky-high but is brought recently to under 10. Holland is vassal.
So, all is rosy and then i get Back to desktop whenever i load the game. It is 1605.
Believing it might be due to not having gone through the whole reformation religious disorder thing, I reload older save from 1570s and go through it - I have religious disorder event and later the end of the same, so I get that out of the way.
However, same thing happens in December 1612. I reload earlier month in that same year and same thing after a few weeks. No event, no threat, no pending development that I can see. The game just shuts down when I load and unpause....
Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem.
Could it be some event that is now made impossible, like having union of GB a century earlier than historically, or some territory that this event is linked to, or what????
Thanks

 

[Kovax]

My suspicion is that it has nothing to do with what's going on in the game itself, but possibly you're running out of room on your drive, or some memory issue. Most likely, once your saved game file exceeds some size, or the game requires more memory than the computer can allocate to it, it crashes.

From the lack of icons in your signature block, I can see that your game is not registered here on the Paradox forum, so I don't know what expansions you may or may not have. You also can't access the game's Tech Support sub-forum (or the mod sub-forum), where you could probably get an official response to the problem. Good luck with it.

[ Note: a lot of older games can only access up to 2 Gb of memory, no matter how much the system actually has, so if you've got other programs or utilities running, the game may run out of memory and crash. As the campaign goes on, it takes more memory to run it, so at some point you may exceed what's available. Note that there are utilities which can allow a program to access more memory (Large memory block aware, or something to that effect), generally 3 or 4 Gb. I had to use one such utility (free download) to run other games such as Mount & Blade with a few of the larger mods. ]

 

[ktx2skd]

You mentioned suspicion of events, you can try removing the event files and see if that improves anything, maybe even start a new game just to verify your file removal is working.

Based on noted dates, it doesn't sound like game is crashing on autosaving time, right? And, it only crashes when unpausing from a just-loaded game you say? Maybe you could try loading a working save and then fast-forwarding the game as much as possible, and see what happens. You could disable or backup autosaves for this test.

Other things of possible relevance:

• Game version/checksum? & was the save always played on the same one?
• Running game from EXE directly.
• Running game as administrator.
• Starting save as another country.
• Checking game log files.

And like Kovax said, you should try tech. support too. You could also share your save here or there.

Best of luck.

- KitCat.

 

[ivankecman]

I got this reply from tech.support, and it solved the problem:
***
One known bug with that version is the colony_construction bug. Open the problem save game file with Notepad, and do a Save As as a new filename. Now search for colony_construction= . Delete the whole section that looks like this
colony_construction=
{
start_date="xxxxxx"
date="xxxxx"
country="XXX"
from=xxx
}
***
Thus, one can continue playing saved game without trouble, but loses colonists that were on their way.
So now i do not save, nor exit the game, while the colonist is on the way.
Did not have the 'Back to Desktop' again
Thanks to all who replied

 

[ktx2skd]

Very glad you got support's help and found a solution, I'm very curious though as to what game version holds this bug... because I never had to impose this restriction on myself or my colleagues.

 

[ivankecman]

Just bought on GOG EU3 Complete, InNomine (stock I guess), no extensions or patches or whatever as far as I know

 

[ktx2skd]

I just glanced by what GOG offers, seems they have the same outdated labeling like Steam... "Complete" is the game with two expansions, but the true full game is "Chronicles" which has two more expansions, totaling four. Be very sure to note that when posting (e.g. I'm 5.2 checksum QMXZ), as I guess most people are more familiar with and will default to think of the latest versions. If reading online though, well, content varies in which version it addresses.

Personally, my debut to the game was on un-patched In Nomine, that's either same as you or very close. However, most of my many hours of game-play were with the last two expansions, Heir to the Throne and Divine Wind, and they change the game quite alot, and I don't remember myself to really regret getting them at any point in time. I think Steam allows disabling them at-will too, but I've never tried.

On GOG I see an option to get both HTTT and DW, but as part of one pack with many other cosmetics, not sure if they can be bought differently. I also don't know if GOG allows disabling and enabling them at-will like what Steam seemingly offers, but if it doesn't then I'm 99% confident you can just take a snapshot of the game's files when it's a given version, and as long as you keep that snapshot safe you can use it to play the given version whenever you want. I only say 99% because I didn't try it for SO long, and I'm a Steam version, which might be different from GOG. Asking older GOG players about this is the wiser move though.

In conclusion:
- There is "Complete", and there is "Chronicles", which is the real complete.
- Inform of version when posting. Expect any version when reading already-existing content.
- Consider "Chronicles".

Hope this was of relevance.

- KitCat.