Hey, don't bother yourself with that dude. I'll try it later tonight or tomorrow and let you know how i get on.

Really appreciate yer help

At lease we tried. I'm sorry I couldn't come up with a fix or duplicate the problem. Take care.

Lo again. I'm not sure if it's possible that it might just have been my gameplay that lead to such horrendous ship output from the AI.

In my first proper game I was sitting pretty with more systems than the AI and was aiming to finish tech tree before engaging the enemy.

Didn't play out that way. 5 opponents, 2 of which grew and gobbled up the others, so by turn 240 we all had ships pouring out of everywhere, I could make about 10 tier 2 ships per system, per turn (coz they get cheaper at the same time as yer output grows).

If ppl normally win/finish a game well b4 this point then maybe the problem won't occur? See what I'm sayin? That maybe the game isn't designed to be played in that manner?

I was taking a very Age of Empires 2 approach; I'd set my front line up miles away and developed back from that point to maximise system ownership. Maybe that skewed all the normal mechanics leading to silly levels of ship output and that was the spanner in the works.

That said, my current map looks like coming to a head before turn 200 anyway. Ain't finished my tech tree though.

Thanks for your assistance, and struggle no longer with this particular problem on my part, I'll let you get back to your expansion. I'm off to pastures new

OK, a little progress here. I'm on turn 205 now. No slowdowns of note or crashes yet, but I'm approaching the turn 210 mark.



I hope it doesn't matter that I already won the game back around turn 160 or so. I hope not. There are only 2 AIs left and I'm at war with one. They had an alliance, but one broke it off when I declared war on the other.



I've been trying manual and auto battles. I have seven offensive fleets, 3 of which are engaging enemy fleets with the others taking star systems. I also have several support fleets that are repairing damaged fighters and feeding the front lines as needed.



The enemy AI is down to 38 fleets with no ability to construct more. The friendly AI has 22 fleets and can build more for now. I'm no longer building ships, but have two dedicated shipbuilding star systems in case I need any.



Hopefully, I'll close in on the problem before long.







I did a quick turn this morning before work. I've been leaving the game running constantly with no problems. I did both auto and manual battles and am on turn 219. Everything works fine. I haven't seen a crash yet, only hesitations that go away after playing a few minutes.



I'm also running low on enemies. The one that I declared war on had fewer ships than it appeared. His 38 fleets kept combining when I engaged him and he now has no ships and one star that'll fall in 3 turns. The other AI declared war on me two turns ago and forced me to build another fleet to do cleanup inside my borders. Since all but one of my other fleets have been freed up, this AI has very limited shipbuilding potential and the bulk of his ships are being held by one of my offensive fleets and a support fleet.



The AI's preference to stack fleets is a big Achilles heal. I've seen this in the expansion as well, but it's even easier to exploit in vanilla where the fighter fleets can attack star systems. I don't have to build or even look for to those pesky bomber fleets.

If it crashes consistently at the same turn, that would be helpful information. I haven't taken a game to 200 turns yet, so maybe I need to extend my play style.



I'm also using a custom race. I have a Sophon and an Amoeba custom setup that I swap back and forth between. I'm going with a custom Amoeba in this vanilla game.



On the adventurer, I can see the value in HP regen in vanilla. I haven't found out how to repair my ships and they do seem particularly fragile in vanilla. I've lost at least one ship per battle so far, which isn't my norm. I can now understand those that like to use Glass Cannon Destroyers (GCDs).



In the expansion, I build high armor destroyers and repair between battles since dust is usually not an issue by the time massive battles take place. That doesn't look like it'll work in vanilla.



If I can duplicate the game crash in vanilla, I'll try to do the same thing in Disharmony.



If anyone else can add to the conversation, please do. The more info we get, the quicker we can either fix this or abandon hope if it can't be fixed.







(I'm editing my last post because I don't want to bump my own thread without reason.)



I played a few turns last night, but didn't spend much time with it. (I have new baby animals popping out everywhere and they need hay to keep warm). I saw that the memory usage is higher now and the game's hesitations are getting more frequent. I don't know which turn I'm on, but I'll try to note it down when I get back home.



I tried doing a couple of manual battles and the game froze momentarily after the battle on the main screen on some of them. My mouse would still work, but the screen didn't respond in any way to mouseovers or clicks. It cleared itself up after several seconds, but it felt like a long time waiting. This never happened to me in Disharmony.



The only crash I ever had in Disharmony was after having the computer running for weeks without rebooting and running the game for a long time. I'm fairly confident that it was self-induced by my not rebooting for so long. In that case, I got heavy pixillation on the screen and my whole computer froze. This time, it was just the game itself that froze.



Testing continues.











It was around turn 96 when the game was hesitating. I've been leaving the game running to try and abuse my system a little. After the initial wakeup from a black screen from the game sitting for so long, it smoothed out again. Total memory usage is fairly steady at around 2.5 GB.



Even the return to the main screen from manual battles has smoothed out. I'm on turn 105 or thereabouts and one AI is almost dead from declaring war on me. We've been slugging it out and he doesn't have many ships left. I only have a few fleets that I've been rotating back and forth, so the depleting of ships might have something to do with the game speeding back up.



I've only noticed scouts from the other AIs, but we don't have open borders.



At this rate, it might be a while before I hit turn 200. I'll keep at it though.

Right. This is the crux of the problem I've got.

Turn 209 will load from the loading ES main menu 'load game' option. It takes quite a while and half way thru the music stops, but the game WILL load, and when I watch a manual battle it doesn't crash.

Turn 210 will NOT load from the main menu, it takes a long time, the music gets LOUDER, and then it crashes to desktop.

But it WILL load if i load a previous save game (turn 1 - 209) and try it from that screen (the galaxy map).

That'll load it, but when I watch a manual battle it will crash after momentarily returning to the galaxy map.

This suggests that the main problem is some kind of graphics overload at the load point of the galaxy map, but only once it's got to a certain point, in this case turn 210.

It could be anything that's causing it, but if i/we/you can find out exactly what it is then i'll know whether the expansion will fix it or just run into the same problem.

Don't get me wrong, I don't watch all of them, but occasionally in a late game i click on the manual button after it's reached the 'saturation' point and then it crashes, which is inconvenient to say the least and then I'm more inclined to start a new campaign rather than run thru til the end. My other option is to try and race to a finish before turn 200, but then i won't finish my tech tree etc.

Feels like I'm missing out

Horde II - Turn 209 Heracles.zip

Horde II - Turn 210 Heracles.zip

I'm playing a custom race, don't know if that's an issue? Pretty sure i had this problem from the off, playing as the Syphons.

and the adventurer type comes into it's own in fleet later on, with improved HP regen on ships and stuff along the veteran path. At first i thought they sucked, but now I try and keep them

Well, I'm only on turn 47 and the game is slowing down and hesitating noticeably. The auto battles are taking a lot longer to process, but as far as difficulty, I'm kind of just phoning it in.



The expansion is a lot smoother and more fun in my opinion. Of course, I started with Disharmony, so purists might disagree as far as the fun part.



I see no evidence of memory leaks or misuse of the swap file. I don't know why it's hesitating and overall slower. The memory usage is actually lower than the Disharmony expansion.



One thing of note is that the adventurer type hero is pretty much useless in vanilla while administrator is op. That must be why they moved some of the skills around in the expansion. I'll press on with the vanilla game, but will probably only play this one just to troubleshoot before going back to Disharmony.



Turn 53 and the screen has smoothed back out, but the battles are still slow to process. I noticed a lot of disk usage while the screen was hesitating. That makes sense, but I don't know why the HD was being used so much. I'll keep testing, but I'm a bit lost as to why it's happening for now.

Better shot with more memory relevant info.

That slight dip is when the game crashes.

Same deal: XPsp2 all sound muted.

This was running on XPsp2 with all the sound turned off.

The anomaly I described earlier was a tiny blip on the RM

Good luck with the animals

I wouldn't think you'd need to run Steam in compatibility mode. If XP SP3 didn't work, I'd think SP2 would be the same. Can you load the game back up and take a snapshot of the resource monitor? I'm particularly interested in the commit memory size to see if the swap file has anything to do with it. I don't know if it'll need to be cleaned before the game can progress.



I might need to try the vanilla version too. I haven't seen the problem myself and it's difficult to try to imagine what's happening. I have some livestock to tend to when I get home, but I'll fire it up after I do some chores.



Hopefully, the vanilla version will be easy enough to understand after playing the expansion.



one other thought - Can you try it with all audio muted in the options menu?

output_log.zip

It crashed again. That's the new log.

I only ran ES in compatability mode (XPsp3) NOT steam, do I need to try that too? (When i tried it said it couldn't do it without 'repairing' steam?) Or just try a sp2 etc ?

Evidently, some people are experiencing crashes late game when viewing or after viewing manual battles. Hopefully, as gamers, we can pool our resources and come up with a workaround.



I'll be testing memory usage later and looking at the Windows API that cleans it up. Scheizer is testing the Large Address Aware flag and an app that looks at the problem from that angle.



If anyone else has any ideas, please post them. Remember that this will be basically a technical thread, not a complaint thread. There are no bad ideas. With this in mind, please keep it civil.

Yes, I agree that it can't be your video card. That's why I'd like to look at compatibility modes. I'm thinking that the older program was written for a 32 bit OS and it might not behave correctly with Win7. I could be wrong and it is a long shot, but it's something that you can test for.



On my Steam connected machine, I'm running an older OS (Vista 64 Business), but I have Win 8.1 on my media computer. I could try it as a last resort, but it's not for games. Hopefully, one of the compatibility modes will work.



Otherwise, I guess I can try reverting to vanilla and playing through until it crashes and play with settings. My video card is an older version of yours (GTS250), so any bugs in one should happen in the other.

Hmmmn. Ok. I'll try that, but I need to have a look at the log from the other system too, to see if that records the same errors. It's a different system altogether with an older video card in it.

Personally I can't believe that it's the graphics card on my new system that's causing the problems coz it doesn't fail with any other games, and I'd assume that something like Rome 2 was much more demanding?

Is it likely to be a case of the graphics card can't handle the load or that there's some kind of miscommunication between it and the game? i.e. a mechanical type problem?

It's a new build from a established company and it's still under 3 year all inc. warranty so i can contact them if it's a hardware issue

This is definately progress though. You star lol

This might not be a memory issue at all. You have several graphics errors before the crash and some during initialization of the game. It's hard to believe that a GTX 680 can't handle the game. That's a pretty nice card.



Just a shot in the dark, but since the vanilla game is older, can you try running it in compatibility mode and relaunching from that saved game? I'd try XP SP3 mode and if it works, try newer OSs until it fails again.

output_log.zip

Bah, and much humbug! It crashed on the same save turn when I played it on the new system too. It's only on turn 210 and there are only 3 players left out of the 6. Game's pretty much over, but it just bugs why it does this?

Memory had a slight rise, from like 20 up to 30 then settled back down to 20(% of whatever the scale is???) in the resource monitor after crash. Nothing alarming though.

I failed to get screen shot

But I did get this output log (see above) from my ES folder just after the crash. I don reeely onerstand non of eet though.

If this sheds any light on my problem then let me know.

Ta

Good deal, Scheizer. Also, if possible, can you check your memory in the resource monitor just before the crash? I couldn't find anything with the expansion, but there might be some info worth harvesting from the vanilla version.



Thanks.

Ok, Update:

I'm playing the same game on two separate systems, one ace and brand new, the other a bit older. I've got the LAA software on the new system ONLY.

I'm up to turn 215 on the old system and it's just crashed after manual battle.

Tomorrow I'll go and test it on the new system (at a different location) and see if it does the same there (and I'm really hoping it won't).

Fingers crossed

I've tried leaving the game open for days and didn't see any evidence of a memory leak. The swap file seemed to grow larger than needed, but after closing the game and reloading, it shrunk back to normal. I didn't try rebooting, but my memory was fine without it.



There was a temporary slowdown when I left the game overnight and then came back to it. That's consistent with pulling the game back into RAM from the swap file, so it's expected.



I tried watching the battles and doing auto battles without seeing any difference. Everything was smooth as silk.



The only non standard part of my system is that I have my paging file forced to 8100 MB. I do that to help general performance.



The expansion seems to be stable as far as I can see, even when put to abuse. I haven't tried the vanilla version though.

That might be a good method to keep in mind if I see a significant slowdown. I've had some slowdowns occur, but nothing major. My machine that has ES on it is an older Core2 Duo and I think it only has 4 GB of RAM and Vista 64 Business. I'll check again when I get home.



Thanks for the tip, Monthar.







A little update - I left the game running static all night. The game ate up a little RAM just sitting there. Looking at the working set, it dropped significantly though.



Last night.







This morning.