Game crashes when I try to save it

[Xanthine]

Hello, help!

I've never posted here before, but I've found this board very useful over the last year or so of playing CTPII. And the Mods made by all of you have turned a so-so game into an awsome one.

I've recently installed the Ages of Man II mod, and this problem concerns that version of the game.

So I'm running: CTPII, with the Activision patch, and Ages of Man II.

I have "automatic saves" enabled, and they work fine. Thank G-d. Because everytime I try to save, the game crashes to desktop. The only time I can successfully save is during the same turn right after I load the auto-save game.

It's enough to make me not want to play Ages of Man, and it's great fun so far, too! Ages of Man III is too big for my geriatric computer, so that's not an option, sorry.

This game is my one remaining geeky streak and I refuse to let it go without a fight. Can anyone help me?

Thanking you in advance,

Xanthine.

[Xanthine]

P.S.

Whoops,

I neglected to mention that I've searched and searched on these forums and others and haven't found the answer to this one yet. If it's out there and I missed it, my humblest apologies.
And I don't know anyone who plays video games, that I might ask them. (Is this even called a video game?)

Xanthine.

[Generaldoktor]

This is severe (and rare.) Possibly the mod designer, Stan Karpinski, could help you, but he is travelling and probably out of touch for message boards, I believe, for the next week or so.

Call to Power 2 is an older game that had requirements that were pretty basic by today's standards. AOM II/III added a little to that, but there has not been a lot of other documentation of crashes, (which is why you didn't see any other "help") as the entire game as modded is just simply not that demanding. (Which is a small part of what makes it desirable, compared to, say, the new commercial product in the genre, "Civilization 4," which is very system-demanding.)

I suppose it is possible to have a computer still operational that is so primitive that even CTP taxes it, with the addition of AOM, but this seems unlikely; my previous, 1999 vintage, 800 mgz, 30GB hard drive machine took CTP2 fine back in the day. (I have a much better machine now.)

Do you have trouble running vanilla CTP2? Where/when did you get your disc for that? Did you do a fresh install of that before installing AOM? Have you tried a total reinstall? Did you understand Stan's directions; some files were to be copied from the download to CTP and some were to just have their contents copied instead, you know?

These are some things you could answer here first and/or try at home.

[angrybowen]

There has always been a save game issue with AOM but it does not affect gameplay in anything but a minor way if you are aware of it. It has been covered at the AOM forum and is in the AOM III readme.

The game may periodically crash when you try to save. Not always, usually after turn 200 and below turn 350. Make sure you have autosave enabled in options/advanced. It should be already from the AOM II download.

You can always reload from auto save. The issue is that if you reload from autosave in the turn you researched an advance, it will revert back to the start of that research. If you built a wonder with a visible tile, it may not appear.

So the readme now says, don't try to save on a turn that you research an advance or build a wonder. If the game crashes, reload from autosave.

Using this procedure I have finished right to the end 15 + gigantic games of AOM and played may starts to turns 300+.

The incidence of this has been greatly reduced in AOM III compared to AOM II in my experience.

[Xanthine]

Thanks for all of the help, everybody. It's still a bummer, but at least I know how to get around it now. Oh, and it seemed to largely be fixed by creating a new save folder and saving there. Weird but true.

Thanks again!