Campaign Crashes

[TheGovna]

Evening chaps...Gov here.

As you know I am the lad who makes the historical/humorous commentaries for Roma multiplayer, but all is not well in single player.

I got this mod around December of last year and have experienced frequent in game crashes after battles. Always puzzled me because my computer is a hardy piece of hardware and can play Napoleon and Shogun 2 Total War fine. I looked at the FAQ's and saw that waiting 30-60 seconds after a battle might solve my problem but nay, it did not.
I came to a premature conclusion that this problem must arise from my computer specs since I have a dual core processor AMD Athlon and an ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4gb of RAM. Could it be possible that ATI's simply don't work well with older games? I had crashes even in vanilla RTW and was dumbfounded. I have a great Roman campaign going on in RSII but have struggled through it with all the crashes. And let me tell you, after a 40-60 min close heroic victory and then having it crash after clicking continue on the battle report screen is heartbreaking. Could it be possible that it is simply too long of a battle for the RTW engine to handle? I've looked at all the graphical questions and answers and I have made sure vegetation is low, graphics are low, unit shaders on, etc, which is disappointing nonetheless because it defeats the purpose of my powerful comp. I have found out that no matter the graphical setting, high or low, it crashes frequently. I always have anti-aliasing off as I have found it to be bugged with RTW.

One more thing I might add is the frequent crashes I have with other mods. I also have EB, RTR, SPQRTW and XC and they all crash all the time! 'Tis maddening considering RTW is my favorite TW and these mods being just superb. (RSII being the best ofc) and not being able to play them in a relaxed fashion and always having the double fingers crossed after a battle praying that it won't crash.

All in all, I was just wondering if there was anything someone could add that might solve this problem. I have pretty much given up on my Roman campaign just because of the crashes but I wish I could resume it if there was a simple fix to my problem... I have also tried making RTW only work on one core instead of two in my processor, yet the madness continues with the crashes.

Thanks in advance for reading and you have my gratitude for any suggestions to help my problem.

Cheers!
~TheGovna

[Sergeant Matt]

IIRC, it's a known glitch that happens when you have large battles, and can't really be solved. It just happens sometimes. So save often.

[TheGovna]

Well....blast.

[Dahoota]

I had a very similar problem with an ATI card + RSII where the game crashed a the start of the loading screen after a large battle. It was resolved by updating graphics card drivers . If that doesn't work perhaps you may need to roll back to a previous version or simply do a fresh install of your current ones.

RTW in general also often doesn't work so well with dual SLI cards either creating crashes on the campaign map, but that was a different problem.

I suspect one of the moderators may move this to the technical help section

[chris10]

There is a crash related to a certain ATI driver (dont remember which one),the info is burried somewhere here:
IMPORTANT THREADS TO READ
In general over the years I found that Nvidia drivers/cards have less problems/issues with games. In the last 10 years I had maybe 2-3 games where Nvidia had issues from release while I constantly read in Forums ATI crashes here, ATI issues there, ATI drivers here, ATI freezes there. Iam not saying Nvidia Cards never had problems but in general a lot less.

As for other RTW/RSII know crashes, there are a few:

• RTW related crash: SiegeBattleReinforcementCrash (avoid siege battles with an AI army reinforcing the garrison > always CTD when choosing "exterminate","ensalve" or "occupy"
• RSII specific mid-battle crashes when zooming into units cause of UNIT SHADERS OFF
• End Battle crashes cause of trait checks (RSII update 2.1a is mandatory)RS PATCH 2.1a
• RTW,ALEX,BI have still a small memory leak...trashed memory is not deleted 100% and tends to build up in the system RAM until the application thinks the system has run out of memory > CTD (.exe can only adress/detect 2GB RAM). Exit and restart the game every hour or so will avoid this problem.

One word of advice...forget about your powerful computer...its nearly worthless when it comes to RTW as the game only runs on one core (NO multicore) and only can use 2GB RAM...video RAM worths something but its the processor doin the battle calculations/pathfinding/moving units etc...
to avoid trash RAM and end battle CTDs lower the general settings to medium..turn anti-alaising off...grass,vegetation to low...UNIT SHADERS ON...resolution 1280x1024... I have a similar PC and have had only 2-3 crashes in about 150 hours......see ?...its possible to play without CTDs

[TheGovna]

I had a very similar problem with an ATI card + RSII where the game crashed a the start of the loading screen after a large battle. It was resolved by updating graphics card drivers . If that doesn't work perhaps you may need to roll back to a previous version or simply do a fresh install of your current ones.

RTW in general also often doesn't work so well with dual SLI cards either creating crashes on the campaign map, but that was a different problem.

I suspect one of the moderators may move this to the technical help section

I've tried updating my graphics driver and I get an error at the end of the process. The madness does not cease.

-- double posts merged (Brusilov) - please use the EDIT button

Thanks a ton chaps. I'll give the graphical settings some tweakings and update this thread once some time has passed.

[tone]

The other thing to consider is using a Large Address Aware patch (google it and follow instructions). Since using this I've not had so many crashes (only really if I run the game without exiting it for more than about 10-20 hours or so)....most of these I'm sure are due to the memory leak, which as chris has says, eventually makes your PC think it's run out of system memory and then causes a crash. Because the textures and models are larger with RS2, more memory is used up quicker. The LAA patch will allow you to run for longer without crashes, like it has done for me.