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I've seen other threads talking about crashes related to saves. I'm not sure if those are referring to loading a save, saving, or both, but I've been experiencing crashes outside of loading a save (only one crash with loading). The one crash a had with loading was with North Korea, and I was able to reload and it worked fine after that. The majority of the crashes happened while I was playing as Afghanistan. The game would randomly crash. It could be a new game, manual save, or autosave and it would crash most of the time. I'm not too sure what would be causing the crashes, but I experienced no crashes except when loading a save as North Korea. The only changes were the country, and windows automatic update was off (I'm close to certain those were the only changes). I'm just wondering if there's any information on why these random crashes happen?

The issue was the game crashing while it is making a savegame (could be autosave or manual). We believe we have resolved that issue for our next updated due... very soon. We'll need it to go out to all users before we're sure that the bug isn't just too rare to happen in our testing.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

Good news if you resolved it. I wonder why it didn't happen at all as North Korea, but happened quite a bit as Afghanistan though.

If we knew, it would have been fixed a long time ago

Finding the cause is the challenge. We moved autosaves to alternating file names because we simply could not guarantee the game wouldn't corrupt a save. Not a bad idea anyway but we kept looking. Game stability is one of our top priorities.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

I've found (playing as USA) that this happens to me when the stacking issue happens (e.g., the AI stacks dozens of units in Hong Kong, etc.). It somehow corrupts or otherwise interferes with the functionality of the autosave, and causes a crash. I found that if fly around blasting the big stacks, the autosave crash issue vanishes.

You actually just need to get to this bug once, and simply look at the stack. I never ever had to use longer then a few minutes to find a bug in civilization.. Simply attach the process with a debugger and keep track of the stack..

It has never occurred in the debugger, only in regular games. And the debugger runs at about 5% speed of the regular .exe version.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

Debugger runs at 5% is good enough, I've seen worse.
But if it never happens, that's a problem yes.. It's like your car never starting, but every time the mechanic comes looking, it turns on and spins as a kitty .. I hate such bugs. But like I said, there are systems that are simply defined to hit such bugs.. simply rebuild those systems and have the debugger running day and night on them.. with 5% that might take you 2 weeks still, but some systems simply hit even random bugs so often that they're not random anymore.

Some people simply have bad luck having those systems.. usually it means something is going wrong with pointers or mallocs.. you can compile your whole program once with a catch for those.. although debugging that might slow down even further :(

or, compile dll's and other files with the debug info and hand those to your beta testers, and ask for specific beta testers that can debug and program. Might help catching random bugs..

But yes I must admit, even then, you might simply have bad luck and those bugs never appear when you need them to..

btw, I only had this save bug when I played a "non-legal" version... because I couldn't buy it.. after 3 days trying many internet shops I finally was able to buy it legally, since then it didn't crash anymore..

So, might be cracked, might be not, but the cracked version does seem to increase the chance to hit this bug.
So you might wanna try it that way (if people report it still exists)

Hi, yesterday my game crashed do desktop without error message. I play Egipt at 1960 and Iran at 1955 - everything is fine with Egipt but I had those crashes at certain day in Iran game (half of Feb 1955), I have no war going on with Iran involved. Reloading the game didn`t worked. I got very pissed and left the game, but today when I wanted to check something to know how to describe the issue here, it`s working fine now... Any ideas? I have the new update patch.