Crash to desktop during battles since 1.3 patch

[Storm]

Vista 64
HD Radeon 4850 @700mb
intel c2d q9550 @ 3 GHZ
4 GB Ram

Allright, I admit I have tons of mods installed, but I made sure they have no conflicts and I'm running those with modmanager.
And also I'm playing as a minor faction but still...

CTD in almost every battle. (land battles that is... never had one on sea, and never one ctd on the campaign map)

Its so annoying... I love this game so much, that I can't go to m2tw back, but on the other hand, that game frustrates me to death when it always ctd's. I wish I could play a campaign without a single battle but with the current A.I. status it's impossible.

[Azrael de silva]

I am having the same problem I am playing with darth mod a AUM I started the russian campaign and had a crash every single battle since.Going to roll back my drivers see what happens.

[Storm]

Guys, did you also notice, that it really tends to crash on campaign battles but NOT on custom battles?

It's kind ridicolous... I fight a 3vs5 units mini-battle and it will most certainly crash.

However, if I fight a custom battle with an awesome 20vs20 line up, it runs stable...

Very very weird

[Azrael de silva]

yup only on the campaign battles...don't know why

[Gorrrrrn]

it's possible game doesn't crash on custom battles because the overall memory load is lower,
i.e. the game isn't holding any of the campaign data in memory when you play a custom battle,
only the data needed for a specific battle between a speicifc number of faction's armies,
on a single battle field.

(Hypothesis - to speed game up, it keeps as much campaign data in RAM during campaign battles,
rather than saving it all out to hard drive (and then reloading afterwards.)

Why games crash after, say 30 minutes of a battle in campaign mode I don't know -
I would have thought there wasn't much extra data space needed during a battle.
It should all be there at the start, and just need changing.

What I have noticed is that it often crashes when issuing orders, so maybe it's an interface issue?

[Dionysus Albinus]

I really doubt that in most cases it is due to RAM. I checked the RAM usage timeline in several battles just before it crashed and about 30% of my RAM were still free during the whole battle and just before it crashed. So I can't believe it is a mere problem of memory.

[Azrael de silva]

It's really frustrating I got a brand new computer for this game(4 gigs ram,core i7 processor, gtx 295 graphics card,32 bit vista premium)...I don't what's happening...sad really one of the best strategy games ever released on to a computer yet the gaming experience is thwarted by problems that should have been addressed in the beta version.Nevertheless,I am still a loyal CA fan as they are the only ones who can release games of this caliber I just hope that our problems are being heard and the solutions found.

[Gorrrrrn]

@DA

I've had several "insufficient video memory" CTDs with a 4GB RAM system and a 512MB HD4850 card.
(running Vista SP2 home premuim. ASUS P5Q mobo. Creative 64MB sound card)

Game usually runs for 2 - 3 hours before falling over in the middle of a battle.

(I've tried running a mem management tool Maxmem to see if that hepls and once got over 6 hours play before the inevitable.)

That said the last Appcrash had a problem with a MSCVR80.dll, which is a microsoft visual studio dll that ATI's CCC uses (I think as part of the front end, not the drivers.

The problem isn't the units or the battle maps as every battle that CTDs plays perfectly when the game is restarted.

SO something happens during the course of playing the game that upsets various components (possibly randomly) that cause the CTDs.

My guess is that eventually the game moves something around in memory into a location it shouldn't and that causes the crash.

[Dionysus Albinus]

Yeah that's what I thought.

The game runs perfectly smooth for me on High settings, but even on medium settings it will crash all the same.

I think you might be right about the game moving something to a wrong place in memory. There is no way the game could use up your 4GB RAM. Especially when there is no lag throughout the battle or some time before it crashes.

[Remison]

Possible fix for some.

I use to crash within 2-4 minutes with every naval battle. Land battles i could go longer but a crash was always likely. Some were hard crashes but some were Appcrash with the offending module being MSCVR80.dll. I just deleted it(backuped up first) and so far no crashes.

I'm running on gtx 260(latest drivers)
qx6700
2 gigs ram
NVDA 680i.

[Azrael de silva]

yeah I can run everything on ultra settings(sky,textures, units everrything)filtering 16x and x anti aliasing...my scenario battles and my skirmish battles work perfectly even with upto 40,000 men in the field(darth mod unit sizes)...I am also running bsm 4...still never had any crashes...it's only on the damn campaign map...I ran a program called game booster from www.techspot.com this frees up more ram...then crashes became less frequent...I also installed empire optimized by killzone db...all together much less crashes but the problem is still there

EDIT: I also was told to copy the memory dll. from COH onto my empire folder this is supposed to stop memory leaks...so if you have company of heroes or COHOF be sure to try this

[Gorrrrrn]

There were known issues with Vista 32-bit architecture memory management that Microsoft claims to have addressed:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

see also:

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060

When ETW crashed last night it was using 1.8GB of RAM (when it starts it is usually using 1.5 GB of RAM)

(the external memory management progs can clear the cache when they run BUT Vista promptly fills it up again.
However Vista should transfer stuff out if the memory space is needed.)

(I intend to go WIN 7 64-bit when it comes out and get another 4GB RAM.)

[Azrael de silva]

I found the awnser...atleast to the problem I am having...the crashes I am getting are due to memory because when i followed the instructions given on this thread(http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=238484) my game stopped crashing...I am running everything on ultra with 16x filtering and 8x anti analising...I was also running darth mod along with bsm 4.
I am currently playing the french campaign and I have had no crashes even with battle with upto 20,000 men on the field(darth mod ultra unit sizes)
P.S-depending on the ram you have be sure to alter the memory you give the more memory the better...but don't give total memory
for e.g(for pcs with 4 gigs of ram):-instead of typing bcdedit /set increaseuserva 2500 type bcdedit /set increaseuserva 3450...which is what I did it and the game functions perfectly...Also try downloading killzone db's optimization mod for better quality http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...t=video+memory
Good Luck!!!

[OldCrowWhiskey]

BIG TIP: I believe most of the crashes in this thread are from Hyper-threading, enabled in 1.3. I've gained a lot of stability by disallowing the "empire.exe" process access to one of my two processor cores (by ctrl+alt+del, selecting "empire.exe" from processes, setting "affinity" and unclicking one of the cores). There is also an etw command that you can run in the console to disable HT but I don't know it... run a search on the forums if you want to go this route.

I went from 50% stability in battles to 85% stability. There are still underlying issues despite the HT.

I will use the ram usage workaround to see if I can make it even more likely that a battle will come through!

[Dionysus Albinus]

Thanks for the input, Whiskey. It's great to see that at least the players try to cope with the lack of official customer service

I thought for a second it might have healed my crash problems, but it looks like it only makes this mess they call Empire run a minute longer into battle before it eventually crashes lol. Thanks for the headsup though, I hope it helps some people with their crashes.

[pajomife]

I dont belive the new patch will fix this post 1.3 ctd , if they had a solution ,why wait? In my opinion this is a minor problem to CA , or they dont want recognise that the game is an '' abortion''. After all this time , and after so many posts about this matter, nobody find a explanation for the CTDs , I with a some computer , but in two HD, can play the game in XP but not in VISTA.

[43rdFoot]

The last time I played the game war early July. I fired it up today to see if it was playable yet.


CTD on the first ing battle. Seriously CA, why the can't you at least make a game that actually works? At this point in time, I don't even care about how well the game works, just that it works.

[Max K. B.]

I actually just registered here to report this exact same problem.

It worked (almost) perfectly prior to 1.3.


CA: please get back to us!

[Gorrrrrn]

How are people finding the 1.4 patch?

I've had two long sessions ( 3-4hours) with both land and sea battles and not had a CTD so far. Even with various background progs still running.
Graphix got a bit jerky at times but that was down to AVG doing a system scan in the background on my dual core system.

Can't say for certain this is fixed but seems good so far.

[Azakil]

I am fed up with this game >.< Really i cant play an epic battle anymore! I had big hopes for 1.4,i though they would eventually fix this ing bug...no,nothing happened... in my prussian campaign,i attacked Paris, full units in both armys...my artillery did a really good job in killing many french soldiers and i was sure this was going to be an easy work for my experienced hardcore prussian line infantry

Then,suddenly a crash! i was like WHAT THE !
I am so fed up with this game..really,its the first game ever that i show SO MUCH patience in such a way..its the first game EVER to throw me in windows screen...i have NEVER,i repeat,NEVER had a game crash like that..

Now,dont get me wrong, i LOVE this game (the idea of it ) but CA has made it unplayable...it has made me to hate it because i cant enjoy an epic battle in campaign map.. if a battle happens to have many units i go like " oh well,it will stop working again,so i will just auto-resolve anyway" IS THAT WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE? Can anyone think of any POSSIBLE solution to this problem?

Sorry for the rage,but really,this is just frustating...