My Swarm Assassin was well over level 20 and had gone through a significant amount of the campaign. When I booted up the game this morning, my hero was gone. I could see all my OTHER heroes just fine, but as I tried to click through them in order to find the assassin, he wasn't there.

Now, it seems like the game sort of thinks he's still there, because when I click the arrow buttons to rotate through my heroes, it glitches slightly on the spot he ought to be at, showing the information of the previous hero, but crashing if I try to load that specific hero.

He seems to be gone from the files as well. I've no clue how this could have happened. No one else could have possibly gained access to my computer. Any ideas what happened, if the hero is recoverable, or what I can do to prevent this from ever happening again?

Any clues would be greatly appreciated.

This happened to me once. If I recall correctly, it was because I had no more memory on my disk, so when the last hero save was done, it wasn't finished, causing a corruption in the save file. I ended up rebuilding that hero with those exact stats through cheats (hero editor) - not sure how you would get the campaign back though.

All the saved games are located in documents/warlords battlecry 3/ saved games folder. The .campaign files are the ones that save the progress your campaign. Maybe those survived the corruption?

I remember the first Battlecry game did this but rebooting the game a few times almost always fixed it. I'm not sure but in that case I think it might have had something to do with the preselected hero.

All I can tell you is that your hero's data is probably still there. Specifically in your documents folder there should be a file called herodata (the XCR file not the folder) which I think is where it actually saves heros. I would go under the assumption that whatever is wrong it isn't the XCR file. If it is the HeroData file then I'm not sure there's much that can be done.

If you want to look in the herodata file to see if your hero is still there there's a unit editor that lets you look at and manipulate heros. A quick search for "Warlords Battlecry 3 unit editor" should bring it up but make sure to unzip it in the WBC 3 directory. (at least that's how I got it to work.) You can also open the XCR with notepad but most of it will be gibberish. You should be able to at least find the hero's name with notepad though. It's always a good policy to back up any files before tampering with them of course.

Sorry I couldn't be any more help.