Well I see there's been no progress on this issue so it looks like I pretty much wasted close to a $100 on a game that doesn't work. 

At any rate I'm  having the same exact issue. Same exact red screen with the same exact wording:  "The game has failed to start."  If there's two of us, there are probably hundreds if not thousands more getting this same problem. Because it doesn't specify or even allude to where the error is or what's causing it, fixing it is almost impossible. I also play with some mods, several of them were added to my game AFTER I started getting this error, so it makes me doubt that a mod is causing this. Especially if the person above was running the game with no mods at all and still got the same error. Just for the sake of completeness, I'll post a list of the current mods at the end of this post.

Most of the time I can get up to around Turn 120 or 130 before the game breaking bug occurs. After that, it's over. If the error occurs earlier, like Turn 110 or 120, I can usually go back a few turns and find an autosave game that hasn't been corrupted yet. I can load the game and it works fine. It doesn't crash or have any serious performance issues. But once I get to around Turn 135, both the manually saved games and ALL of the autosaves have been corrupted - the games won't load and the red message appears. At that point, there is no way to recover these games that I've spent hours playing. 

I don't mean to sound like an angry troll here, but I get annoyed when I see that someone is having an issue like this and apparently no one bothered to respond. Makes me wonder if anyone even looked at his diagnostics file or anything else. Either that or no one bothered to post the fix here for some reason. But I'm assuming it's the former since why would someone send a fix via private message so no one else could benefit from it. Which means ... as I said ... another wasted hit to my wallet. I'm just getting sick of spending money on snake oil. 

But I'll post my diagnostics file and my mod list - even though the first person posted his issue a month ago - and not a word has been posted since. Is anyone even still looking at posts for this game? Is this a case of:  "Well if it's not a common problem with an easy work-around, we're not going to bother"?  Even if someone posted a, "We don't know how to fix it" post is better than nothing at all. 

Diagnostics - 2021'04'04 @0430'52''.html

Endless Romance for sure doesn't work.

I know a good half of most of the mods on your list are old and probably won't work.

2 years and no solution to this?

Excuse me anyone there?

Can we get an answer to this?

I have not played the game I have not paid for in two years because of this bug. Please fix it. 

fatalfart wrote:

2 years and no solution to this?

Excuse me anyone there?

Can we get an answer to this?

I have not played the game I have not paid for in two years because of this bug. Please fix it. 

This is an issue related to mods, not a base game problem. 

I'm now having the same problem with yesterday's ReAwakening patch or maybe it was just a general patch in Steam.  No mods.  Just can't load my game and I was at Turn 160.  Very frustrating.  Does anyone have a fix for the save game files?

stalexone wrote:

I'm now having the same problem with yesterday's ReAwakening patch or maybe it was just a general patch in Steam.  No mods.  Just can't load my game and I was at Turn 160.  Very frustrating.  Does anyone have a fix for the save game files?

Right click on ES2 in your steam library, hit properties. Go to the Betas tab, and set your current beta to 1.5.48