According to the developers and folks posting here, Xin XP 32 bit users are experiencing a lot more crashes than Vista/Win 7 users, and especially compared to Win 7 64 users.  What are your machine, OS, and video specs?

Hi Publius,

Many thanks for your quick response.  My spec is as follows:

CPU :  AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720 Black Edition 2.8GHz (overclocked to 3.3GHz)

Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (Socket AM3) PCI Express DDR3

Ram :  Corsair 4GB DDR3 DHX 1600C9DHX Twin3X (2x2GB)

GPU :  Radeon HD5770 x2 (Crossfire)

Hard Drives : 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - using one drive for Programme files and one for data.

I am running Windows 7 64-bit OS.

I would have thought this is still reasonably high-end, wouldn't you?

Yes, except for the CPU (I have an Intel I7) your specs aren't that much different from mine, and I've had very few crashes.  Your crashes are supposed to be automatically sent to Stardock via their Smart Exception software, but Brad (Frogboy) has also asked for us to post them in the support forum.  Please refer to this post for what files they want to see and where you can find them:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/415301

Have you tried without overclocking?

It may be that your overclock is normally stable, but that FE loads it in a different way than what you normally do.

One such difference could be that FE is much more multithreaded than most other common software, using all your cores at the same time and needing to coordinate them.

WOM used Pixel shader 2.  This was meant to allow older laptops to run the game.  Unfortunately it caused unforseen memory problems with newer video cards.

New cards actually ran out of memory faster than old cards. 

FE uses Pixel shader 3 which fixed this issue.

See here for Frogboy's explanation.

http://www.google.com/url?q=https://forums.elementalgame.com/413051&sa=U&ei=35leT-X6KpKItwfb1-SpBw&ved=0CAYQFjAB&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNGS8eTAS8v0i1pxsS_AwnjnOgW94Q

Could running the video cards in Crossfire be doing it?  What have others been seeing while running in Crossfire mode?

I have a similar issue, but I noticed something odd. I had been playing mostly on Novice while i acclimated to the game.  it seems in 0.86 if I play on Novice, I get a crash within the first few dozen turns, without fail.  I've uploaded about a dozen crash logs for this issue already. It's also a repeatable crash, in that I can load the last save and it's always the exact same number of turns before the crash.

Just for giggles, I tried setting the world difficulty to Ridiculous and then setting the individual AI difficulties to Novice and haven't had a problem since. 

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit on a quad-core i7 with 12 GB of RAM and a Radeon 5870.

Oh yea well my Commadore 64 makes your Apple II look like a ...umm Apple II......I got nothing

Greg_B, that's exactly what I have been doing so-far.  I'm going to try what you did.

Lord Reliant, thanks for the tip - I didn't know that I could Alt+Tab out.  I shal certainly check that.

Well, it does seem as though it was Novice causing the problem somehow.  Not having played WoM, I decided to use Novice for a while just to have a look around, but the game crashed so quickly that I didn't get the chance to see much!  I tried this 6 or 7 times with same result as Greg_B - then I read his reply to my post and tried again using Normal difficulty.  Since then I have been playing at least six times as long as I was able to before and it hasn't crashed yet.  This is rather strange - I wonder what might be causing it?  Thanks to all those who replied to my post.  I checked Task Manager on Normal and everything was fine; haven't checked it at Novice level though - not sure I will, either.  I want to play a bit now!