Matrix Games Forums

I just bought the game. Installed the base game. Updated it. Played it. It saves and loads games fine.
OK. I had also bought the Eclipse expansion. Installed that, did all the updating.
Got back into the game, deleted my old save game (which was all of 2 turns, so it really didn't matter, it was just a test). Started a new game. Very nice. Played a few turns, saved the game. Ate lunch. Came back, launched game, hit load... and it gives me an "unknown error" that when I click it closes everything down.

So, I have a nice, expanded game that can't be played because it won't load any save game.

I uninstalled, redid everything incremently, confirmed that the base, updated game can save and load properly. The loading function only breaks when I install and update Eclipse. I do not have a way (I do not know of a way) to stop Eclipse from updating, so I don't know if the failed-load function is from the base Eclipse or the updates.

I deliberately held off on buying Pandora until an expansion came out that fleshed out the systems and made it much more interesting -- that would be Eclipse. So it's ironic that I can only currently play the base game and not the expansion.

So, what do I do now?
(yes, I updated all my drivers; and as I said, I reinstalled and checked each possible increment of play/update)

Courtesy of the amazing folks on the Slitherine forums, I've had some help with this. What we've learned: there is a beta patch 1.5.5 which addresses the broken load feature for Steam versions of the game. Non-steam versions can try to use those files, but from my own experience I can say this: they don't work.
You can load games using those files as beta, but only as long as you don't close your client. So if you play for a while, then shut down the client to do something else, then come back later, the load function doesn't work.
So there appears to be a solution if you're using a Steam version, but not for the non-Steam version.

I can only hope someone fixes this so non-steam players can actually play the game.

Again, I am amazed at the speed and helpfulness of the folks at Slitherine's forums. Really quite something.

My guess is that if you got stuck saving and trying to load that file, that file just because corrupted. There's not much you could do to fix it, so if it is corrupted, you'll have to delete it.