3 Different Crashes

[yeem]

Right now I am stuck on turn 368-369 (yes, yes, I am playing a slow game). Well, what is happening is that I have been seeing what appears to superficially be three different types of crashes of the game.

1. The computer turns itself off when the turn button is hit.

2. The screen becomes partly refreshed and then the game stalls and the computer becomes completely unresponsive (for instance, most of the bottom tabs are visible but the rest of the screen is either the previous screen or blank).

3. A bunch of small green vertical lines appear at the top of the screen, the computer stalls and becomes completely unresponsive.

The oddest thing is that since I got the game Feb 28th it has been quite solid without any problems (well, other than the DirectX something something error for the victory cinematic).

I have thus far tried turning off the cinematics, turning off the music, and turning it down to low detail.

If you have any other suggestions to try it is worth a shot.

MOO3 is really starting to grow on me and to be tripped up at this late stage of the game, grrrrrrrr!

Yeem

edit: can't spell

[Proteus_MST]

Never had those Errors in my Games.

The only Problems were the Direct-X Errors which occur always, when another Program on my PC has a Message Window and gets the Focus. After returning to the Game it always shows the Direct X - Error (and yes, I have toe newest Version of Direct X).

I also played longer games til turn 400 or so.

Could it be your Computer Ressources?
For example a Shortage on RAM or Memory on your Harddisk or a CPU which is a bit too slow?

(For Comparison: My PC which never had a Problem with the Game (aside from Direct X) has an AMD 900 MHz. 512 Meg RAM and in every Partition of the HDD at least 1 GB free Space)

[Epistax]

I heard someone else mention this, I don't remember the exact fix, but I bet you someone just won the game.

Have to just had an election? Someone may have got voted to the senate.

What is likely happening is the game is trying to run a movie. I forgot why this would cause a crash, but another person's computer was reseting because of this. He turned off movies, or something along that line, and then lost or won (don't remember)

[yeem]

A couple things, I also have had the DirectX problem, but that was because of too many saved games. I pulled out all but the most recent ones so this is not the problem (that and the lack of the DirectX error message itself).

Also, nobody else accidentally won the game: I have ~90% of the senate votes (I turned off this victory condition), I have 3 X's, and, well, I am still in the game so was not eliminated. Oh yeah, the cinematics are all turned off as I said in my original post (the computer was for some reason having trouble playing the 5X win cinematic in one of my previous games).

About the computer resources running out: I am playing on a 800 MHz P3 with 128Mb RAM (this at least matches if not excedes the requirements stated on the box).

Yeem

edit: I did some searching on the IG forums and found that my problem is common enough that there have been several threads started concerning it. The work-around is to lower hardware accleration. And it indeed cleared up the crashes I all of a sudden was experiencing.

Riddle me this...
Perhaps a computer engineer/programmer can shed some light on why, after 2 weeks of stable game play, did the game suddenly decide to become buggy?

Yeem