EB 2 Multiple End of Turn freezes, always on Eleutheroi

Alright, first I'm aware that the game can hang for a long time when a faction goes horde. But I don't think this is the case here. I've had on 3 different occasions, had the game freeze on the AI's turn, always with the Eleutheroi. Last time this happened was on turn 6, and I left the computer running overnight and it was still frozen in the morning. Worse, my system becomes totally unresponsive and I'm forced to just shut it down.

Alright, I did some testing and figured out a bizarre work-around.

First of all, the freezes are non-reproduceable, which is to say I would load a savegame the turn the before the game had frozen, and then it wouldn't freeze again during the Eleutheroi turn.

Initially i wanted to see what it was about the Eleutheroi turns that was causing the game to freeze, so I toggled the console and use the toggle_fow. Except the game never froze. I then started just toggling the console, without the toggle_fow command, and that was sufficient for the game to stop freezing. I don't know why this is, but it just works.

Secondly, and off topic, but I started playing the Atilla expansion (?) for Rome 2. That seems to be a natural candidate for a hypothetical EB 3, no? Limitless factions, built in nomadic factions, family trees and internal politics, much better AI than Rome 2, fertility mechanisms for provinces. Seems like, as a base game, this is more or less ideal for a mod like EB 3, maybe in 2022?

Unless it fixes all the bad mechanical choices, like removing secondary weapons, and all the locked-down stuff, not likely.

Yeah, map editing which is one of the most important parts of modding is locked inside of the atilla exe.

They say its because it is now integral and interconnected to the exe, but then they didn't ever alert us to the fact that photoshop could edit the maps back in the early rtw/mtw2 era of modding... Maybe one day someone will figure out how to edit maps fully (new settlements/regions etc, not just aesthetics) but I doubt that will happen in the near future.

That's a pity. Hopefully, as you say, someone manages to crack it. I could see it potentially being the best EB ever, with limitless nomadic factions etc. Though good lord, it would be a lot of work.

Back to the bug:

I think I got it this time. My bizarre workaround (which had worked for roughly 40 Sweboz turns) stopped working when I decided to start a Roman campaign. First, by running in a window and having task manager open, I could close the game when it froze. That would close the window, but a medieval 2 program would keep running (well, not responding) in the processes, and that would just refuse to close. Futhermore, when I would try to restart my computer, it would immediately freeze, which would force me to hard boot.

Since I don't fancy hard booting every 2-3 turns, I tried to pay attention to when the freeze was happening, and that's when I noticed the little 'ping' you get when your turn begins. Which means that it was either some script occasionally locking up my computer, or the autosave. I did 3 things: set the game to windows 7 compatibility mode, made medieval 2 run as administrator and disabled autosaving in the medieval 2 config. Haven't had a freeze since (20ish turns) and I'm pretty convinced it was the medieval 2 autosave that gave me grief.

If anyone else is having problems with an end-turn freezing, you can disable autosaving in medieval2.preference in the main medieval 2 folder. Just change it from 1 to 0 .

Also you can try this.. If it ever happens again it might work.
http://i.imgur.com/btpaIq9.png

Be sure to find the correct process though and then right click on it and say end process.

It's called
kingdoms.exe

Unless you have steam in which case it would likely be something like medieval2.exe.