After an enjoyable Kislev campaign, I was having fun with Cathay (playing as the Storm Dragon, defending the Great Bastion) when it happened. First the game crashed when loading an auto save, then it crashed loading another auto save, then it crashed again loading a manual save. It's frustrating to lose a campaign to save game corruption when I'm about 130 turns in.

The obvious things (verifying the game files on Steam and checking that my PC has the latest graphics drivers) didn't stop save more save games from being corrupted. I wasn't using any mods and I didn't load an old save with a new update of the game (I started a new campaign each time the game was updated).

When save game corrupted happened with Empire Total War, save games kept becoming corrupted even after I uninstalled and reinstalled the game. What solved the problem for me with ETW was to move the preferences script file to a different location. When you do this and start the game, the game detects that it doesn't have a preferences files and creates a new one (presumably, it does whatever the game does when it runs for the first time after a fresh installation).

I'll try the same solution with Warhammer III. Unfortunately, as far as I know, when a save game has become corrupted, it can't be repaired - if this solution works, it will only stop new saves from being corrupted, it won't repair corrupted saves. Since the save game corruption only happened after more than 100 turns, I might not know if this worked for some time.

In case any other Warhammer III player has the same problem and would like to try this, here's how:


  1. Open your File Explorer (on a Windows 11 PC, the yellow rectangular icon at the bottom of your screen that looks like an old floppy disk)
  2. Navigate to C:/Users/[your user name]/AppData/Roaming/The Creative Assembly/Warhammer3/scripts (by defaut, some of these folders may be hidden, so if you can't see them, you might need to search for 'how to reveal hidden folders in [your operating system]')
  3. Create a sub-folder called something like Old Preferences Files
  4. Move the preferences.script.txt file into the sub-folder
  5. Start the game in the normal way.


As I said, there is no guarantee that this will work. If anyone tries this, or if anyone finds another solution for save game corruption, please let me know.