Launcher crashes because of Savegames - Game corrupts saves

[Rotkohl]

Hello there everybody, and thanks in advance for trying to help!

So, ever since Steam had that update where they changed the interface, my launcher refuses to start, turns wholly white and crashes.

While trying to solve the issue, doing a clean reinstall and so on, I noticed the launcher doesn't crash when there's no savegames in the savegame folder.
I first thought my savegames were simply corrupted and causing the crash, but when I started a new game, while it worked twice when starting the game, the savegame was causing the same issue the third time I started the game.
The same happened with the next game I started. It works at first, but becomes corrupted and causes launcher crash after a short while.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions!

 

[AndrewT]

I'm not aware of any problem in the game that corrupts saves after being loaded twice - and we'd certainly have ha dthat reported many many times if there was such a bug!

What mods are in use?

What antivirus app do you use?

 

[Rotkohl]

Hello there Andrew, thanks for your help!

There are no mods in use.

I use Avast free Antivirus, but the game file and steam are on the allowed list.

I don't really know if the save files are truly corrupted, but they cause the launcher to crash if they're in the saved games folder after loading the second time.

Here's the new savegame I started after I found out my old savegames caused the crashes, and which is causing the same crashes now too.

 

[AndrewT]

That save game file is entirely composed of NUL characters. I have no explanation of how that is possible.

Do you have autosaves happening? Does this happen to them too?

What if you save to the cloud instead of locally?

 

[Rotkohl]

I play almost exclusively Ironman, so this should be an autosave - or does an ironman save stop being an autosave if I click "save and exit"?

Btw, by chance I found out an old non-ironman game of mine still works. Could the problem have anything to do with Ironman mode?

I haven't tried saving to the cloud yet, will try that next.

 

[AndrewT]

Actually Ironman doesn't do autosaves as such. It does forced saves, which are a different thing! When you start a new Ironman game you choose whether it is cloud or local when you give the campaign its name. It does a save on load, and after significant events from then (when you declare war for instance).

 

[Rotkohl]

Okay, so saving to the cloud works, apparently. Still weird what's happening, but at least I can play now. Thanks a lot!

 

[AndrewT]

The standard save location is a Windows System folder, which AV apps protect by default - that's all I can put it down to.

We can test that by changing where the game does local saves if you wish, let me know if you want to try that.