Olden Era Crashing & Stuck on Enemy Turn: Fixes That Help

Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era launched into Early Access on April 30, 2026, and it sold a million copies in the first month. That kind of crowd hits bugs the testers never saw. If your game crashed to desktop mid-siege, or the AI’s turn just hangs forever with the spinning indicator and nothing moving, you’re not alone and you didn’t break anything.

Here’s the honest part up front. Some of these are Early Access bugs that only Unfrozen can fix with a hotfix. I’ll tell you which ones those are. But a good chunk of crashes come from your own machine, and those you can actually do something about right now.

Fix the Enemy Turn That Never Ends

This is the one people scream about. You pass your turn, the enemy AI starts thinking, and then it just sits there. No unit moves. The clock keeps running but the battle is frozen.

Try these in order before you nuke the whole battle:

Wait longer than feels reasonable. On big late-game maps the AI can be managing a stack of a thousand units. On a slower CPU that calculation genuinely takes a while. Give it two full minutes before you assume it’s dead.
Alt-Tab out and back in. Sounds dumb. Works more often than it should. The render thread occasionally stalls while the simulation underneath is fine, and forcing a window refresh kicks it back to life.
Turn off combat animations or set battle speed to fast. In the settings there’s a battle speed slider and an option to auto-resolve animation. A frozen-looking turn is sometimes just an animation that failed to start. Speeding things up dodges the hang entirely.

If it’s truly locked, you have to force-quit. This is why the next section matters so much.

Save Constantly, Because Early Access Bites

Your saves live in Documents\Olden Era on Windows. Worth knowing, because when a crash eats your session you want to know your last save is real and not corrupted.

My rule for any EA strategy game: save manually before every battle, before every town visit, and at the start of each in-game week. Don’t trust autosave alone. Use named saves and rotate through a few slots so one bad write doesn’t take your only backup with it. If a save won’t load, go back one slot. A corrupted save usually only kills the most recent file.

If the whole Documents\Olden Era folder gets weird (settings won’t stick, saves vanish from the menu), back it up somewhere else, then let the game rebuild a fresh one. You’ll lose your config, not your campaign.

Crash to Desktop: Work Through These

A straight crash to desktop is almost always one of a handful of usual suspects. Run down the list:

Verify the game files

In Steam, right-click Olden Era, go to Properties, Installed Files, then Verify Integrity of Game Files. A botched patch download is one of the most common crash causes, and this catches it. Do this first every time the game starts misbehaving after an update.

Update your GPU drivers

Old graphics drivers cause more crashes than people expect, especially right after a big launch when Nvidia and AMD push game-ready drivers. Get the latest directly from Nvidia or AMD, not from Windows Update. Then reboot. Actually reboot, don’t just close the installer.

Kill the background junk

Overlays are a classic crash trigger. Turn off the Steam overlay for Olden Era, and shut down Discord overlay, MSI Afterburner, RivaTuner, and any RGB control software while you play. Browser tabs eating your RAM don’t help either. Close them.

Drop your settings

If you crash during big battles specifically, you may be running out of video memory. Lower the resolution a notch, turn down shadows and textures, and cap your framerate. A stable game at medium beats a pretty game that dies every third fight.

Performance: Stutters and Frame Drops

Olden Era isn’t a twitch shooter, but late-game maps with huge armies and lots of map objects can chug. If you’re getting frame drops:

Cap the framerate at 60. An uncapped framerate on the main map can make the GPU work for no reason and run hot.
Lower shadow quality first. Shadows are usually the heaviest setting for the smallest visual gain in a top-down strategy game.
Close everything in the background. Yes, again. A turn-based game shouldn’t need a beast PC, so if you’re stuttering, something else is stealing cycles.

Steam Deck and Handhelds

People are playing this on the Deck and it mostly runs, but expect rough edges in Early Access. The UI has a lot of small text and dense menus that were clearly built for a mouse, so reading unit cards and managing the spellbook can be fiddly on a small screen.

If you’re on Deck:

Force Proton to the latest stable version in the compatibility settings if the game won’t launch or crashes on boot.
Cap the framerate at 40 and the TDP lower to keep it from cooking itself on long sessions.
Use a touch-friendly or mouse-style control profile. Trying to navigate the spellbook with a thumbstick cursor is misery.

Verified status and proper handheld polish usually come later in an EA cycle, so don’t expect a perfect experience yet.

When It’s Just a Bug You Can’t Fix

I’ll be straight with you. Some of this is on Unfrozen, not you. Crashes tied to specific battles, the enemy-turn freeze, and save corruption are known Early Access problems, and the only real fix is an official patch.

When you hit something that survives a file verify, a driver update, and a clean reboot, do two things. First, file a report on the official Discord or the Steam forums with your save file and a description of exactly what you did before it broke. Devs fix what they can reproduce, and your save might be the one that cracks it. Second, check the patch notes after every update. Early Access for a game this popular means frequent hotfixes, and the bug ruining your weekend might already be dead in the next build.

Until then: save often, keep a few backup slots, and don’t take the AI freeze personally. It’s the game, not you.