unspecified error - CTD PLEASE HELP!!!

[magnus28]

My system:

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (2.1Gig) (cpu)
MSI K8N Neo4 - Nforce4 Ultra (board)
1Gig Pc3200 400MHz (ram)
OS Windows XP Pro SP3 - UWIN edition
EVGA Geforce 7900 GS ( GPU)

The Problem:

ONLY crashes in the campaign map, either loading it, or after the end turn button is pressed. sometimes it just goes to black screen, I press enter and it brings me back to desktop. ocassionally i'll get an nvidia driver error and my desktop will go back to 4 colors. mostly it gives me the unspecified error though.

What i've tried:

- updating to latest nvidia driver - including beta drivers (163.74-163.76)
- rolling back to older drivers - tried 94.24,91.xx
- reinstalling directx 9.0c
- reinstalling M2TW
- lowering graphics settings down to all medium/low shader ver 1, trilinear filtering, no v-sync, no bloom effects, low grass detail etc.
- trying resolution in my game to run at 1280x1024 and 1024x768.
-uninstalling, cleaning and reinstalling varies series 7 drivers from nvidia.
-using ntune to optimize my system settings.


my video card is at most 1 year old, I paid $260 CDN for it about 5 months ago. I know people running this game fine on lesser systems.
I heard about the deleting of those 2 files from the unpacker, but I installed the game from 2 DVD's (retail) and no such files were found.

please help.. i'll post dxdiag or whatever I have to if it helps.

thx.

p.s yesterday the game worked well for about 3 hours. now it crashes every 2 mins of gameplay. I haven't changed or downloaded any other programs.

edit: oh yeah, i've installed patches 1.1, 1.2, 1.3-which says it's compatible with kingdoms - i only have the vanilla M2 - no expansion. should I only have game up to 1.2 ?

[XantheKnight]

I'm having the exact same problem, but instead of a CTD I'm getting total freezage which requires hard reboot. Sometimes I am even graced with a blue screen of death that tells me that my graphics driver has fallen into an infinite loop (gee, thanks, MSFT!).

I basically can't play the game. The problem is much worse with Kingdoms than it was in vanilla. After I isntalled patch 1.2 the problem crept in. I am thinking of uninstalling all patches and going totally vanilla.

Sadly I don't have a solution for you. I think that MY problem is a result of some kind of new extra taxation on the graphics card in 1.2/1.3/Kingdoms, or some poor game-to-driver communication in M2TW. As you are vanilla already, I don't know what could be causing yours, unfortunately.

I am officially not going to buy new copies of anything from SEGA or CA again until they come out with three successive games that don't have significant problems. It's come down to this: clearly, these companies (and it isn't just SEGA or CA) aren't listening to direct input and feedback from their consumers. Market factors are the overwhelming drivers in their behaviour, and so I'm going to stop giving feedback and start voting with my wallet.

I love this game, especially with mods. But, at the end of the day, I just can't play it. And for that, I won't pay again. I'll buy someone's used copy or find another way to legally play the game without paying.