This is possibly one of the 'Urkan related bugs (they sometimes die when they shouldnt or dont get released correctly when certain empires die). The community patch fixes these issues, allthough probably not retroactively in your savegame.

I do have the urkans dlc active, true. and one of the urkans is not in my hands, true also (though I forgot whom exactly has the thirs one). so maybe you're correct. I'll check out your link for the ciommunity patch, though I find it strange that, if there's already a community patch for it... why don't the devs implement it as a minor patch, or something?

As for reatroactyively.... he only died  5-6 turns ago, so that's still doable. But I don't want to redo 160+ turns. ;-)

thanks for the help! If that fixed it, I'll let it know here!

I was going to comment further, but: it seems the ELCP helped: the little bugger died, but their urkan was still there (unaffiliated now, of course), and the game didn't hang anymore! So thanks!

One little problem, though. I'm not sure it's related to the ELCP or not, but I have (well, play) the game on two PC's with my steam account. Now, on one I had installed the ELCP, on the other not. But, even with the pones in steamcloud, the other wouldn't play the saved games anymore. Some sort of null-exception/error, or something, and the game didn't start up. Now, I tried to install ELCP on the second as well, thinking it had to do with that. But at the same time, I thought: why don't I move the game to my SSD? (It was still on my old HD on the PC, and an SSD is much faster, but I don't have much room there.)

And so I did. However... When I use the ELCP.exe, it ALWAYS goes to where it used to be, on my G drive. And I don't see any option to tell it to go to the other instalment? I used to think it was because it looked at where steam was installed, and not at the SteamLibrary. So I even installed the whole steamclient on my SSD as well, not just the game. But I *still* get th null-expection error and the game(s) don't start up (except those that I start anew from scratch).

Now, I'm not 100% it has to do with the ELCP, but I strongly suspect it is. I've already retried doing everything, having a verifying/integrety check (which should get rid of all superflous ELCP remnants, right?) and then trying to reinstall ELCP, but the exe STILL doesn't download in the C:, even though now my game AND my steamclient is installed there. So I don't know how it's still looking and auto-installing on the G:, where it used to be??

Anyway...: is there a way to force it to install it on my main SSD, the C:, and overrule the auto-install on it? So I can at least try if that's the cause of the problem. If both games have the ELCP, there shouldn't be a problem playing eachother games anymore, and if it still does give the error, it's not ELCP related.

So can you or anyone tell me how to get the ELCP to install in the c: volume?