I'm three years late here, but I had this same issue (I installed with Vortex), and was able to fix it so I wanted to leave a note in case anyone else wanders in. Apologies for the thread necromancy. Here's what I did to avoid the crash (these may be more steps than necessary). Reinstall Better Cities without the Open Better Cities option (which seemed to be causing the issue). I tried both with and without the merged options, didn't seem to make a difference, so you should be able to do what you want there. My game loaded fine at this point, but Open Better Cities is cooler, so: Go to the Sanctuary and talk with Ocheeva to advance the quest (I also went through all her initial dialog options) Leave the Sancturary and Cheydinhal. I fast traveled to Pell's Gate to make sure I was well away from any city that Better Cities would change. Save and exit Reinstall Better Cities again, turning on Open Better Cities this time Load the game, confirm no crash, save and exit Updated the Better Cities ini file to Open the cities and add wall archers Loaded my save, and Open Better Cities seems to be working with no crashesGiven the above I'd imagine that simply advancing the quest to where you've talked with Ocheeva would work, but haven't actually tried it.
