That's where i am as well. This game, in my opinion will be a masterpiece, but in it's current state it's very hard to test. There seems to be just too many bugs right now. I thought this version would hopefully squash alot of bugs?

Okay Brad, you did warn us. I have never participated in a beta program before and it seems that i never will elect to enter another.

I going to try out 3B, hopefully it will solve most of my crash issues. Looking  forward to a great game when finished.

We've been working on performance issues related to the sound engine and the overlay this week and have had some very good progress (personally I've seen reductions of 20-50% in idle CPU usage from some of the changes).

There are too many threads for the devs to reply to them all, but showstopper issues such as you note have been and are being investigated.

Didn't help with me. This is one thing I've tried and my CPU was still at 95+ percent usage and the scrolling/graphics were still choppy.

Hopefully 3B will be the end of that.

Since we are discussing it..

My map scroll/zoom are very choppy and the character selecting and movement orders are a bit unresponsive, not totally unresponsive but enough to be an irritation. I can't tell if its my computer  or the build. Others don't seem to have that problem but I can play games like Civ 4 or EU3 without any problem. I think I'll just wait and see.