Fix a Game That Is About to Crash

[GearMonster1]

I am currently playing a game as Lithuania, and I crushed a couple of rebellions, which I believe is the cause for accessing a null variable. Right now there is an army with 0 troops for a country that doesn't exist besieging my vassal in Dobrazyn. The empire that the siege belongs to is not on the map from what I can tell and I can't get any information on the siege itself.

From what I can tell, the siege will have an event fire the next day and that will crash the game. What I was hoping is, is there anyone who can knows how to resolve this, or where I can resolve this so I can keep playing this ironman save game?

 

[GearMonster1]

Sorry, I should have included a screenshot to help out(derp).

 

[Rags17]

I haven't done much save modding but I'll give this a shot.

• First, make a careful note of the name, location and other details of the offending army.
• Next, save your game on the day before the crash, remembering to to tick the Uncompressed box. This will save the game as a 70-80 megabyte editable file.
• Next, download a copy of Notepad++, which a super-cool version of Notepad (everyone should have a copy of this at all times!).
• Now open the save file in Notepad++ - this will take a minute of two as the save file is HUGE.
• Do a text string search on some of the terms that you saved about the offending army. Hopefully you should be able to find this easily, however it may take some time.
• Once you found the army isolate the entire block in which it appears and delete it. Save the edited file.
• Open the save again and the army should be gone. Fingers crossed this should fix the problem.

If all else fails post a (compressed) version of the save for the community to look at. Don't forget to include which DLCs etc you used to play the game !

 

[GearMonster1]

Thanks for the help, I actually followed all those steps using 7zip to open the archive. I found out that wasn't the issue and it was something else, somewhere else, since I found out that even removing that block in the save it was still crashing on May 3rd. There may be a myriad of events firing that day and I don't believe I would ever figure out which one is bricking the game. Also found out I cannot continue Ironman for the achievements after editing anyways so there is that as well.

I really appreciate the help, but I seriously do think after tinkering with it for a bit and after some google searching it might be more prudent for everyone's time that I start a new game.