So I’m hard at work on the Brave New World chapter of my multi-star winning series on Civilization 5 achievements. However, I’ve run into a snag – Brave New World has some known bugs! My game crashed to desktop during an especially long attempt at some of the more challenging achievements, and my progress is blocked until they’ve been fixed.

In the meantime, I thought I would document the two known crash bugs in Brave New World that I learned about through the 2K forums. Hopefully, with this info, you’ll be able to avoid them.

Brave New World Crash Bugs: American Archeology Bug

This one’s simple enough. If you’re:

Playing as the Americans

Research Archeology

Dig up an Antiquity Site in neutral (ie, not owned) territory

The game tends to crash. So, either don’t play as the Americans, don’t play as the Americans and go crazy with archeological digging, or don’t do so in neutral territory. If you’ve got a save from right before you did this, you might be able to interrupt the Archeologist and move him somewhere else.

Brave New World Crash Bugs: Trade Route Razing Bug

This one’s a bit easier to trigger, and it’s the one I ran afoul of.

Conquer a city that has a trade route

Raze the city that has the trade route

The game has a chance of getting into a real bad state and probably crashing. There are a couple of symptoms I noticed:

The game freezes or crashes to desktop on the Barbarian Turn

You can’t open the trade route interface without crashing

These two things are pretty good signs that you’ve hit this bug.

When I hit this bug, it was the turn after the city had finished razing. I was in the process of razing another city, which I assumed was the one causing the bug. What I did to fix it was load an old autosave and stop the razing of the first city.

After a couple of turns, I checked the trade route interface and the trade route had stopped, so I razed it again successfully.

I’d say the key takeaway here is to be careful about razing cities, and to keep a save a turn before they’re completely gone. That way, you can back up a turn or two if you run into this bug.

Brave New World Crash Bugs: Others?

If you’ve got a different bug than the ones I’ve listed here, I’d suggest going to the 2K forums and posting a new thread in the Civilization V support forum. There are some sticky threads there that give you an idea as to how to best submit your issue. I’d suggest grabbing your save file and posting it somewhere for for others to test as well – it’s very helpful for confirming that it’s not just something with your PC.