Stuck in Steam Auto Update / Validation hell? Turn off Auto Updates and Don't ...

[City Builder]

If you are having issues with your steam bought version of King's Bounty Crossworlds, you may want to try this.

Issue: You fresh install King's Bounty Armored Princess, then install Kings Bounty Crossworlds. Steam then either doesn't let the game play, or you're not seeing the content to Crossworlds. The issue being that Steam goes into some kind of a loop of validating KBAP's content, then Steam validates KBCR(crossworlds) content. What I believe is happening is that because both KBAP and KBCR are installed in the same folder, they are both downloading files that are used by both of the games but which are not exactly the same, so when steam goes to validate KBAP it downloads all the files that were added by KBCR, and when steam validates KBCR, it sees all the files are not the right ones that were downloaded in the validation of KBAP. Thus it can go into a continuous loop between the game and it's expansion, and unless stopped by the user, or steam or whomever, will just continually invalidate what steam downloads for those files that failed validation on KBCR during it's validation of KBAP and visa versa.

The simplest solution is to

1. Download fresh copy of KBAP, and then validate it. Then turn off the option to update KBAP automatically in steam (right click name of game, and choose properties then turn off the auto updating)
2. Download fresh copy of KBCR, and then validate it, it may or may not find failed files, depending if steam ran validation for KBAP after you installed KBCR. If it found failed files, go ahead and download them.

Now as long as you keep the auto updating turned off for KBAP, and don't manually try to validate the files for KBAP, you should be good to go.

My belief is either that Steam has somehow messed this up, or that KBAP and KBCR should not be installed into the same folder structure if (*IF*) they are using the same files for each game, but those files are different and thus found to fail the validation when steam trys to validate all the files for KBAP, after KBCR has been installed. But this is my guess only.

It could also simply be that Steam has screwed something up and is not validating the two programs correctly when it should be. As megakill is aware of the issue, he will be checking with Steam, but in the meantime if you have an issue of losing the expansion pack (i.e. can't see the new main menu screen, it still looks like KBAP's main menu, then you may be experiencing this issue with Steam and KBAP, KBCR) then validate KBCR and do NOT try to play KBAP, only play KB Crossworlds until they have a fix for this issue.

Hope this helps anybody else that might be experiencing this issue too and I know there are a few at least.

cc: reposted to Steam forums