[quote]Wondering if I should add my save or not, or is it common enough to not need one?[/quote] Please do. Always err on the side of "too much" detail--better to be able to ignore it than to have to ask and wait for it.
When reporting a crash, please provide detail/context as much as possible. Your debug.err file would also be helpful, as noted in the reporting guide sticky.
If you reload the last autosave, can you reproduce it?
Did you select the custom Empire option? Others have reported a crash with that particular one as well (custom Kingdoms should work).
Please provide detail and context when reporting a crash. What were you researching? Can you reproduce the crash if you reload the last autosave and do it again? Etc.
Please provide your debug,err file and any dump that may have been generated when reporting a crash. See the reporting guide sticky for details.
I'm not sure how you got those improvements strung out that far from your city in that save (that part may be a bug)--the behavior that you can only build off some of them is correct, though. You're supposed to be limited to a certain radius based on the city's level.
Please provide as much context as possible when reporting crashes like this. Were you moving to a particular special tile? Just around in general? What else was going on at the time?
What did the BSOD say the faulting file was?
For reference, tearing occurs when the frame drawing and monitor refresh rate aren't synced. It's generally only visible when the view is in motion and looks like part of the screen shearing off as it's half a frame ahead/behind. This is just the terrain showing through the floor texture of the improvements.
For the white medallions and cards, try disabling antialiasing.
Try saving before founding the city, and if it happens, see if it happens consistently if you reload and do it again. If it does, we can use that savegame.
Holding the middle mouse button/wheel allows you to tilt/rotate the camera.
We recommend using Jing to post screenshots. See the reporting guide sticky for more details on that. Screens would be very helpful when reporting visual issues. If you experience crashes, we also need the dump and debug files as noted in the guide as well.
Are you using a hard link to do that, and which OS are you using that has the problem, since you say XP is fine? I'm not sure if it's still the case, but TweakUI used to allow you to remap system folders (including My Docs) without needing to resort to hard links.
Please use dropbox or another host that allows direct-linking. Rapidshare or similar sites that have timers, captchas, limits, etc make it difficult to get at the files.
The button(s) with the color swatch is for setting the various model colors for the current equipment tab, so that's working as intended.
The blurry map is caused by advanced lighting; disabling it should allow you to get a clear image. Please provide your debugging info as per the reporting guide sticky though, so we can see your system configuration and isolate this issue. Also, please provide the dump file for the alt-tab crash if one was generated.
Please provide your debug info as indicated in the reporting guide sticky. We can't really do much with reports of performance or animation issues without system config details.
Do you have any studies in your city/cities? A savegame with the circumstances this occurred under may be helpful.
Did you previously have another resource that you've completely exhausted? This behavior has been seen before only when the box is sized down after a resource is removed (it grows correctly).
BSODs typically indicate a driver flaw or hardware failure; the most any game can do is expose them.
Try rebooting your machine.
[quote]things would look soapy and somehow definitely not for 1650x1080.[/quote] Screenshots of this would be more helpful. We really can't guess what "soapy" means in regards to the graphics :p
[quote]Did you close impulse after starting Elemental? The beta needs it to be open[/quote] All that is needed is that you've installed Impulse and logged in at least once, which you had to have done to install the game. Impulse does NOT need to be currently running in any way (neither the client nor the tray app). Make sure that you allow the game through any firewalls you have. It must be able to connect to the server to get the data files upon run.