Repeated crashes during Victoria 3 multiplayer sessions

[CFresco]

Hello, I have been attempting to help a friend of mine solve their repeated crashing issue.

Their crashing is not unique to Victoria 3, and occurs occasionally across all Paradox titles, but Victoria 3 is by far and away the most frequent, with crashes every couple of minutes after usually an initial period of smooth gameplay (anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour).

I have run through the process of having them do a full clean re-install, and I had them disable fullScreen optimisations. Unfortunately this has not resolved the crashing issue.

The current running theory we have is it might be a power issue relating to BIOS or Windows 11 settings, but I have no way of confirming that information.

I have taken the opportunity to have them provide me with a DxDiag.txt, system.log, and the numbered error.logs (error.log was empty, but error 1 through error 5 had data). I would normally have liked to check their crash logs, but as far as they told me they didn't have any.

Any advice or direction would be appreciated.

 

[AndrewT]

These crashes just affect your friend, no one else in the games?

What is the nature of the crashes - are they Out of Sync (OOS), or a game =crash, or a whole-of-PC crash/freeze?

Has it always been the case for them, or only since what change or update?

Is it only in MP, they can play all these games solo okay?

Does it make any difference if they are host or not?

You mention all Paradox titles see this. Some use Steam MP (EU4, HOI4), some Nakama (CK3, Vic3), and some are configurable (Stellaris). Which exact titles are affected?


IF dxdiag.txt fails to attach here, rename it to dxdiag.log , or zip it up.

 

[CFresco]

These crashes just affect your friend, no one else in the games?

What is the nature of the crashes - are they Out of Sync (OOS), or a game =crash, or a whole-of-PC crash/freeze?

Has it always been the case for them, or only since what change or update?

Is it only in MP, they can play all these games solo okay?

Does it make any difference if they are host or not?

You mention all Paradox titles see this. Some use Steam MP (EU4, HOI4), some Nakama (CK3, Vic3), and some are configurable (Stellaris). Which exact titles are affected?


IF dxdiag.txt fails to attach here, rename it to dxdiag.log , or zip it up.

Yes, the crashes are only affecting them.

The crashes are only Crash to Desktops, no other apps or players seem affected by the crashes. Often they are able to rejoin the game within a minute or 2 after crashing. We do have occasional Out of Sync errors, but that is roughly the same rate across all of our players, which is pretty rare, with their crashes being far more frequent than OOS.

The crashes were very rare originally, but became a problem around April, I do not recall if there was a particular update to Victoria or Windows 11 during that time period.

If they are hosting the crash rate is dropped some, but it does still occur, as well as when they play singleplayer.

Victoria had the most common and frequent crashes, but we had crashes while they hosted and joined Stellaris and CK3 games, though less often. We don't have any games with HoI4 or EU4 within the last while, so this is untested.

I have attached the dxdiag zipped.

 

[AndrewT]

Two possible causes of this in there:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900KF

They may have the CPU/bios hardware issue discussed here:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ration-intel-processors.1591821/post-29305331
If they haven't updated your bios recently (say, the last month) please check for an updated bios. Then please implement the “Intel Default” option in it, if present.


Try that first, if still a problem proceed with these steps, in order:

Operating System: Windows 11 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 26100)

I see they have Windows 11 24H2; this can be the cause of this problem, it is a severely broken Windows update that has caused problems across the whole gaming - indeed computer - industry.

A user has come up with another possible workaround
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/24h2-w11-update-issue-found-no-more-crashes.1728373/
Some affected users have definitely seen that help them with this issue. I'd suggest you look at this step first!

And another user has found a different approach to the issue:

A ‘crutch’ that solves the problem with computer freezing.

For a long time now I've been experiencing the problem of my computer freezing while playing CK 3. This method helped me to completely solve the problem while playing the vanilla game without mods, with mods the game sometimes crashes during...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

And, for CK3 switch the game's renderer to Vulkan on the launcher-game settings tab; for this game In your Steam Library right-click on this game and choose Properties. In the Launch Options line, paste this in there:
-vulkan

Good luck!