I seem to encounter a similar problem, in that the game crashes upon reaching the 'Loading Flags' part. Unfortunately, my technology files seem to have nothing to do with it.
define.lua and the mapfiller properties point to the same start year. The Tech History too, was freshly generated from scratch with those files.
My guts vaguely pointing towards the history files in general, I generated a new batch of them all from scratch too. Still without avail.
I hope one of you people could estimate another cause of this problem.