Broken Save.

[EternalSlayer]

Ok, I was recently playing my awesome Syracuse campaign when my PC decided to randomly crash as it tends to do. It was at the beginning of a battle. Luckily I'd saved before the battle, so I thought I'd just reload the save, everything will be fine. Unfortunately this did not occur. The save simply does not load for me. I have since gone back and completed that battle (I backup my saves every day for precisely that reason), so I'm slightly confused to why it wouldn't work. It was a perfectly normal prebattle save... If anyone would like a copy of the broken save to play around with, I'm willing to EMail it. I can't upload it right now because my browsers have both gone mad for some reason and go crazy when I try to upload stuff. But I'd really like some indication of why this happened so I can avoid it in the future. I lost 40 minutes of gameplay because of it.

[Brusilov]

Well, if your PC randomly crashes there is a chance that at some stage it will do so while it is writing or updating a file - it's simply a matter of time before something becomes corrupted.

Have you tried to track down what is causing the crashes? If you play for a certain period and then it crashes it may be a heat problem.

[EternalSlayer]

Half the time it is overheating, although I do manage to evade that problem now. But the other half it seems to be a hardware or driver conflict. I just can't be bothered to send my PC back to be repaired.

However the save was about 20 seconds before I switched the power off. The battle had loaded and everything. So I'm not sure that that could have been the cause.