save file corruption

[david-gb]

I have only recently gone back to playing mods for M2TW again and therefore, I don't have much experience dealing with save file corruption and how to prevent it; I therefore, wanted to ask a couple of questions regarding the subject.

I have been reading that the best thing to avoid losing your campaign is to save regally and have a lot of safe files. What I have been doing is having 10 safe files at anytime which I reuse one after the other, which means I am not creating completely new safe files but overwriting old ones and I was wondering if is likely to lead to a corruption of those save files or does it have no effect?

I was also wondering how to recognise that your safe file has become corrupted? Does it just mean that your save file won't load or does it mean that it could load but you would get problems appearing in the game. For instance I am currently playing a campaign as the Seleucid Empire (around turn 120) and I am getting some wired errors. For instance the friend of the king script no longer triggers so I can't make any of my nobles more loyal by making them friends of the king. The messages about me having free subjects so I can build Hellenistic Polis or military colonies no longer appears. I can still build them from time to time, the game just won't tell me its available. In sieges I can have some trouble getting my troops to go up the siege towers, they will walk them to the walls put instead of climbing the tower they will drop the equipment. I have to manually tell them to pick it up again and attack the wall again. Other times half the unit will go up the tower but the other half will just stand there. The AI does not seem to have that problem, instead from time to time they won't be able to get the battering ram to the game, instead they just spin it around and around next to the gate without attacking. It has been over 10 years since I played M2TW so these siege issues could have always been there and I just don't remember but I thought I would just check its not because my save files have become corrupted.

Thanks for your time

[Shoebopp]

Fortunately and unfortunately, what you listed are not save file corruption symptoms, but rather just out-of-the-box bugs/features. The friend of the king script only allows new court members if you haven't exceeded your cap. Chances are you've been appointing as many court members as possible (which is great for ensuring loyalty!) and reached that cap. Either increase the size of your empire or the extent of your faction leader's authority, or wait for your court members to die off (or... expedite the process).

The settlers/colonizer notification only appears for the first few 16-turn cycles.

As for the siege tower bug (and siege bugs in general), avoid giving your troops ANY additional orders while they're ascending ladders or siege towers. Doing so would make them immobile. If that happens you can fix them by ordering them to move onto the ground behind the walls. Just be patient .

If there's slanted ground in front of your walls, the battering ram (when controlled by either the AI or player) would be unable to ascend. Call it great physics programming or terrible game design.

The save file CAN be corrupted though. You can tell if you try to overwrite a save but the game doesn't ask you if you're okay with overwriting. To fix this just save under a new name. You can also corrupt a save file by modifying savegame-incompatible files.

Safe:
export_descr_buildings.txt
export_descr_unit.txt
a few others

Unsafe:
literally everything else (export_descr_character_traits.txt for example)

[Septentrionalis]

As a general practice, I recommend making backups of the save files as well. It once happened to me that in another game in which I had spent 200-300 hours and was ready to go in for the endgame phase (first and only playthrough), my entire savegame folder (probably about 1,000 items) got corrupted all in one go. No idea how that is possible, but since then, I have had a backup drive for my savegames.