Caranorn said:
I decided to take a look at the save file itself to see whether it might be something easy to fix.
Looking for entries on Yaroslavl (province 572) I find it listed once as county C572, once as duchy/kingdom (U019).[...]
Edit: I tried a simple fix (deleting the U019 duchy/kingdom entry, replacing the second 572 entry under capital with a 0 and adding 572 to provinces... it didn't work.
First off I can confirm nearly all of you findings in my corrupt saves. I had discovered the "bastard" county u019 before, but I did not look much into it except noting that it was a "user defined tag" which I did not understand. u019 does not exist in any of my saves which work, and it exists in every save that I have which does not. u019 appears to "steal" a county from a legitimate county in the game, which can vary. You report 572, while mine are 101 in one save and 974 in another. I also noticed that clicking on the list of counties at the new game screen for a corrupt save displays a blank shield first.
The capital list you posted looks normal to me (with one exception); it appears that way in my healthy saves too. After the sequential captial list there is a long series of zeros -- what the provinces listed after the zeros mean I don't know. I do note that none of the second group of numbers appear in the first group, but not all those which did not appear in the first group (the capital list) appear in the second group. There are also numbers higher than the number of provinces the game has, all of which is normal.
What is not normal is that province 974 appeared in both groups in the save where u019 had stolen 974 and likewise with the province 101 save. In both cases, the stolen province number appeared in the second group as the second-to-last number, which I note is exactly what happens with your 572 as well.
I tried correcting the file, probably similar to what you did. I deleted u019, all of the charachters in u019, and in the entry for the robbed county, I typed 974 (or 101) in the list of provinces owned, which was blank. I have never seen any county entry which did not own at least it's own county (was blank) except for the county robbed by u019. I also replaced the 974 in the second number group (under capital) with a 0.
I commenced to load the game and the first thing I noticed was that the blank shield appearing first under the county selection list was gone. This establishes a certain link between u019 and the blank shield. So I was very hopeful, but when I tried to load the game, it crashed again.
It was not all in vain however since if you'll recall my earlier post I said that the save always crashed with the load bar near the end, when it still said "reading scenario." When I tried loading the save after "fixing" it the load bar reached the "initializing script" stage before it crashed. I repeated this to make sure. Therefore there was some improvment.
I was suffering sleep deprivation at the time so I didn't have the energy to work on the file anymore. My suspicion is that some or all of the characters I deleted was important to the game -- I can find out but havn't done so yet. In any case, someone with greater understanding of the save files than I have would be of aid.
This problem has been documented by at least two people on different systems with different capabilities so I can only hope this will bring an official acknowledgment by an employee of Paradox, instead of merely dismissing the problem as the result of the consumers' systems.
Of course it is entirely possible that it is the consumers' computer problem -- you stated you had 128 MB ram and I had the same until a few days ago when I upgraded. (Of course, I could also point out that 128 is the requirement published on the box.) If insufficient memory corrupted the saves then my upgrade would not correct my save obviously. I will be the first to profess my ignorance but this doesn't seem right to me. These saves are complete. All of the information is complete -- and then some. How could low memory give birth to u019?
I
hope that it is a memory problem -- I will find out soon. I'm going to keep playing my good save, and if it goes corrupt, then it's not memory. (Unless 640 ain't enough now either.) If that happens Paradox seriously needs to look into it.
I will try tampering with the file again (I did back it up first) since I have one save of a game I am particularly distrought about losing.
By the way, congratluations on all of your discoveries.
