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Okay then, you must have one or more corrupted saved games. Move them all out and confirm the game starts okay, then move them back one by one to see which are bad.

Since I had done a complete hard uninstall twice, I only had a single save game in the folder at all, so it's that one.

But how do I avoid the files becoming corrupted and causing this in the future?
 
That's an excellent question and I wish I had a great answer. Obviously it depends on why they are corrupt.

Any computer file can become corrupt for a number of reasons and save games are more liable to it as they get re-written so often. But if you are getting it happening reliably from this game that implies a game bug or some other such factor ... we had one case here :
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...use-of-savegames-game-corrupts-saves.1344698/
where a save would load once but be corrupted when loaded twice. It only happened with local saves, not cloud saves, so had to be some local problem. But we never nailed that down.
 
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I switched to doing only cloud saves currently and so far that is working.

It's just perplexing to me that I played for more than a year with 1200+ hours and never had this issue then suddenly it happened 3 times in a row where a save very quickly became corrupt to trigger this.
 
If the game doesn't make a settings.txt , whatever causes that will not be fixed by making one yourself.

Place the attached file in the same folder as ck2game.exe . It tells the game to write settings.txt and other user files right ther einstead of under Documents/Paradox/CK2. Does that help at all?

Hey, I was having the exact same problem as OP and this fixed it. My folder containing the .exe didn't have a settings file for some reason.
 
...My folder containing the .exe didn't have a settings file for some reason.

Likely as that's not the folder where it should be....
See post #2.
 
OMG , thank you after downloading that file it seem to work .... plus I have ensured that steam doesn't run in the background !!!
It often does in the little icon next to the batter. Ensure you swith it off there too !
god luck everyone
 
The fact that userdir.txt helps means that EITHER the Windows User Documents folder has been moved and the game cannot find it, OR there's an antivirus app getting in the way of the game accessing that folder. Most commonly Windows Defender but could be any AV app really.

Just so you know!