I know I'm not the only person here experiencing the bug that causes saved multiplayer games to vanish.

Me and my friend played with 1.04 patched game, of course we saved the game often (by the host) and every time to a new file. All went normal, until suddenly the saves just stopped showing at the "load game" list. Saves showed up and worked to a certain point, but everything saved after that point seemed gone. No new saves showed up either. But we knew that the saves were there, only hidden, because they DO show up when you go to the "save game" menu. It didn't help that my friend hosted the game. I don't know if the game has a save game limit or the game does not recognize saves in different slots.

We found a simple trick that let us continue the game with our latest save (that seemed to have disappeared). I hope it works for other people too, because it's very frustating to notice that hours of gameplay may have been pointless. At least it's worth giving a try.

1) This procedure must be done for BOTH players.

2) First off, you need to open My Computer and browse to C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Petroglyph\Empire At War\Save

3) There you should see all your saved games, named as slot0.sav, slot1.sav, slot2.sav...

4) Arrange the files by Date modified.

5) Find a save that is the latest known multiplayer save.

6) Make sure your friend has the same save, although it may have a different slot number. Look for date and time that matches.

7) If you have a single player save that you might want to keep, find the latest known single player save as well. This is usually an auto-save.

8) Delete all but the located file(s). Then you should have two files remaining, the single and multiplayer save. For example, I had slot0.sav and slot26.sav, my friend had only multiplayer saves, the latest he had was slot33.sav.

9) Rename the single player file to slot0.sav and the multiplayer save to slot1.sav, even if you do not have single player saves. The most important thing is that both players have the latest multiplayer save named the same way. This is just to make sure it works.

10) Start the game, let the same host be server than last time (to avoid sync errors).

11) Voila, you should be able to load the last saved multiplayer game.

Interesting. I will make Petroglyph aware just incase it's something they are not aware of

DMUK