D'know if anyone is still monitoring this site.
When playing TOE Steam version the game has a bug where it creates corrupt save files. The corrupt saves appear to be smaller in MB then a non-corrupt save. It has been suggested elsewhere that it is Large Sized maps that create the problem. It has also been suggested that it is profile corruption or that there is a 3 gig limit for the game in memory.
Loading a corrupt save crashes the game. Both saves and auto-saves can be corrupt.
If there is a known solution sharing it would be very helpful.