Someone help an aspiring Shogun?

The crashes... oh, the crashes!

I bought the Shogun 2 collection from Steam last week (it's the one that includes Rise of the Samurai as well as the main campaign and a bunch of clan DLC).

Started up the tutorial straight away, and experienced a freeze during the first battle. After updating my graphics drivers I was able to continue a bit further, but it was still touch-and-go. I got to the siege tutorial battle and had a freeze/crash, at which point I decided I'd just go ahead and see if the actual campaign worked better than the tutorial.

Started up a game as the Otomo and have continued to get crashes. I took the following steps so far:

-scanned for malware (none found)
-verifed integrity of game cache (looked good)
-altered the preferences_scripts.ini to prompt me to choose between dx9 and dx11 on start-up (I choose dx9, since that's supposed to be more stable)
-set my virtual memory in the Performance Options section of my control panel to 8 gig.

The crashes seem to occur most often when I am loading up a battle; the progress bar will be almost finished, then the music will pause for a sec, resume, and then I get a CTD with a generic 'Shogun 2 has stopped working' message. I don't even get to the battlemap. Restarting the game will usually work.

I also get crashes on the battlemap itself. A particularly annoying example last night: I was besieging another clan's capital with a full stack, and they had a full stack as well. They sallied out; the battlemap loaded up; I used Esc to skip the general's speech, and within about 3 seconds of having camera control the game froze and crashed. Tried again and this time I was able to be on the battlemap for a few minutes - long enough to fight with the enemy - before it CTD'd. Eventually I completed the battle, after around 3 CTDs.

The campaign map doesn't give me much trouble, although one time I noticed some visual glitches during a naval battle (the distant landscape looked completely black and 'spiky'), and when I returned to the campaign map things seemed really... strange. Land and water in the wrong place; that sort of thing. I tried to return to the main menu, CTD'd, restarted and reloaded and things were back to normal.

So, some things I haven't done yet:

-Updating sound drivers. This seems more complicated than updating graphics drivers. For one thing, NVidia has a fairly easy automated process I could follow. But my sound drivers... I'm honestly not even sure which ones I have. I looked through my control panel and had the computer search for new drivers, but it claimed everything was up to date - I find that hard to believe, since the most recent date on those drivers is 2011.
-Running Steam as an administrator. Not sure if this would help, but I've read some people have luck with this.
-Ditching Google Chrome. Again, I don't know how this would help anything, but it seems to be a problem for some.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing these crashes, and how to prevent them? I've never had such trouble with a game before, and it's beyond frustrating that I can play the thing just fine sometimes but around 2/3 of the time I get these inexplicable crashes.

I found this thread at TWC, the gist of which is the game was installed on a drive other than C: - and external hard drive if I followed it correctly. Installing the game on C: fixed the issue.

Other than that, I've seen suggestions for using Game Booster software or making sure Net Framework and your Adobe Flash player are up to date. I've seen a number of people complaining of having the same issue, but, alas, nothing definitive on fixing it.

Thanks for the reply, Gregoshi!

I'm 99% sure the game is installed on C:, along with Steam and pretty much everything else (since I tend to do the default suggested 'Program Files' installation), but I'll check.

Haven't heard of Game Booster; will check into that. Net Framework is also a new term for me.

Adobe may well not be up to date... Does Shogun rely on Adobe Flash more than, say, Medieval 2 or Skyrim (both of which run fine)?

CountMRVHS, can you give more info on your system?

Desktop/laptop?
Which OS?
Amount of RAM?
Graphic card(s)?
Hard drive/SSD?
TWS2: any mods installed?
Graphics settings/unit sizes?

I'm not really a tech guy, but any of the above info might help in narrowing down a search for solutions. And I have no idea regarding Adobe Flash and TWS2.

Also found this thread at the Official forums: Before You Post in the Support Forum... There might be some information that might help.

Post #3 has a link for how to read the error log. That might shed some light on the problem. Here's a direct link to that item: Error log info

Thanks again, Gregoshi. :)

My computer is a desktop, with Win7.
It's set up a little weird, from what I understand. So it's a 32-bit machine, but with 12 GB of RAM - except that only ~3 GB of RAM are available. One thing I've done is to change the amount of virtual memory to 8GB, but I'm still getting crashes.
Graphics card is an NVidia Geforce GTX 560 Ti. Recently upgraded the driver.
Hard drive (no SSD) - are you looking for the amount of memory available here?
No mods installed.
Graphics setting were originally on the highest setting possible, but I just tried dropping everything down to 'high'; no change in crash behavior. Unit sizes are probably on the highest setting too (120 Yari Ashigaru per unit), and I haven't changed those.

deleted 'tl-dr'-post ...

Couple of suggestions. Check you have the minimum specs the game requires, including processor which so far hasnt been named.
32bit only supports 3G of memory. Sell the rest or get a 64bit OS. Now you're 'aging' ~9G out of 12G just for the heck of it ... and yes it does age eventhough your OS does not use it (read up on 'dual channel mode' before you do sell anything though).
8G of pagefile seems extremelly heavy and might just cause more problems than it will ever do good. Specially since you cant just move the pagefile to the physical memory, if needed, since the pagefile is over twice the size of the actually used physical memory. (I honostly cant say much about pagefiles beyond that they are your second choice of memory. As such I have ample memory in my system and have turned off and removed the pagefile completelly.)

Seeing my 'high end' system, specially compared to your specs, has quite some difficulty with (some) ultra settings I'd be amazed when your system would properly run the 'battle game' on anything above normal, possibly low settings. The 32bit thing is killing you here.