I’d like to begin by saying I love the game, it’s a lot of fun and very difficult in the Galactic Conquest mode.
However, I have been having regular crashes that prevent me from advancing very far (provided I can actually get good enough to take over the galaxy :)).
These crashes seem to happen during the transition from a battle to the campaign map, usually after closing the results or during the zoom-out of the map.
The crash may be related to an issue I’m also having with deleting ship designs. Sometimes I’m unable to delete an obsolete (or ineffective) ship design in the “load” menu, but can in the “save” menu (if i can find it, sometimes the names are messed up and I can’t identify which is which). Sometimes after deleting a design, it is removed from the “load” menu however the ship can still be constructed. When this happens, it seems the game crashes shortly after.
Thanks in advance for any advice that you can offer.
I should add that I purchased the game via Steam and run it on an older PC, with a first-generation dual core (I think 1.3ghz/core) and 4gb of ram upgraded from 2. Windows XP. I’ve attempted to uninstall and reinstall the game, searched for similar issues online, the usual things.
While I have not had much experience with campaign errors, I will see what I can do.
Generally speaking I have not had much luck with deleting designs when in the middle of a campaign. It is better to leave them alone and delete them once the war is won. Later you can cull the ships that are no good and keep the ones that you want.
First of we need to see what kind of errors the game is throwing.
In theory (Because your running steam) there should be a directory \My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles\debug if that is not there then there should be a steam equivalent.
If you could post the errors.txt here so we can see what the problems are.
I will post the errors.txt if I have time in the future.
So, deleting fleet designs is a known issue? Is there any solution or fix to this? As this does seem to be correlated to my crashes, I will begin my troubleshooting there.
The game is set up to prevent you from deleting a ship design that is being used in the current campaign. So if you have an active campaign (meaning you have a save file for that campaign) and you have a “Super Death Cruiser Mk XII” somewhere in one of your fleets, the game will not allow you to delete the design for the “Super Death Cruiser Mk XII”. If you delete the campaign save, or if you can locate the ship(s) of the class you wanted to delete and get rid of all of them, you should become able to delete the design (it is, however, by design that you cannot delete a ship design which is currently in use in a campaign, so make certain, to the best of your ability, that you don’t have any ships of the class floating around before you get too frustrated trying to delete a design). However, I have on rare occasions found that the game sometimes does not fully delete a campaign save file (don’t know about errors tracking ships in use during a campaign, as I don’t normally delete designs while a campaign is in progress), in which case you want to go to
(or the equivalent location, if Steam puts it somewhere else) and delete the campaign save folder that you find there (if you have multiple such folders, delete whichever ones do not show up in the menu where you choose to either load an old campaign or start a new one - you’ll be able to tell, because the folders are named the same way that the load games are in the campaign selection screen, and one (or perhaps more) of these folders will not have a corresponding campaign available for being loaded if this is the error causing you an issue). This should allow you to delete any designs which were used in that particular campaign but which are not present in any other campaign game currently active. I would always recommend that you first use the in-game method for deleting campaign saves rather than deleting the save folder, because it works most of the time and means you don’t need to worry about closing the game and finding a folder somewhere, and only if that fails to enable design deletion manually locate and delete the folder.
I can’t tell you anything about avoiding campaign crashes except that the only campaign crashes that I usually experienced in the past typically occurred after a longer game session. I don’t think I’ve ever had a campaign save that became unloadable, and if I recall correctly the crashes only ever cost me the most recent turn, so I can’t say I ever considered them to be more than a minor nuisance.
Thanks Aeson, what you have explained makes sense to me. It seems my crashes are more severe as sometimes I cannot reload the same campaign. I’m pretty busy so the time I can spend trying to fix a game is limited however I appreciate your post, thanks again!