Crash to Desktop 1.4

Hello,

I have played 1.4 nonstop now and it all worked out fine, I love the game that it is right now and everything seemed like a goodfeeling time.

Then suddently in a battle. "Boom" crashing out to windows vista 64 bit. And then I reload the game and play the same battle again.. crash to desktop. over and over. now I tryed to play without any battles and suddently in the campaign game I got a CTD.

So the history ends here. Back to World of WarCraft?

I got a 6 months old computer I wasted 1800 euro for playing Empire: Total War.

Anyone got similar problems?

Cheers and sorry for bad grammar.

I just recently bought myself a new computer, not just to play empire explicitly on, but I do play it on it, I also have Windows Vista 64bit and I do have these crashes to the desktop in battles and occaisonally the Campaign map.

I can only recommend one piece of advice so far that has lessened the crashes for me (before it was rediculous, now I'm lucky to get one crash every second battle -

Turn off Depth of Field, it helped for me slightly.

For those that are curious here is a complete list of Errors I have recieved:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Product
Empire: Total War

Problem
Stopped working

Status
Report Sent

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Empire.exe
Application Version: 1.3.1.0
Application Timestamp: 4a4e5af1
Fault Module Name: MSVCR80.dll
Fault Module Version: 8.0.50727.4016
Fault Module Timestamp: 49cc5361
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0001500a
OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3
Locale ID: 3081
Additional Information 1: fd00
Additional Information 2: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
Additional Information 3: fd00
Additional Information 4: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160

Extra information about the problem
Bucket ID: 1357449786

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Product
Empire: Total War

Problem
Stopped working

Status
Report Sent

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Empire.exe
Application Version: 1.3.1.0
Application Timestamp: 4a4e5af1
Fault Module Name: Empire.exe
Fault Module Version: 1.3.1.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 4a4e5af1
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0045e9d1
OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3
Locale ID: 3081
Additional Information 1: fd00
Additional Information 2: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
Additional Information 3: fd00
Additional Information 4: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160

Extra information about the problem
Bucket ID: 1360520905

Actually nevermind about posting them all, that would get rediculous, Sufficed to say I have 11 of these reports so far. I saw one topic on a forum where one person has had 68! of these crashes, and as always the exception code is c0000005 and the fault module is either Empire.exe or MSVCR80.dll as far as I've been able to google no one has been able to figure it out, CA have not responded to the issue whatsoever as far as I've been able to ascertain and with no solutions, those of us who went out and bought brand new computers for this and high ended games, remain utterly annoyed by the fact that we have brand new computers which Empire can not run on properly! My old computer doesn't even get a crash on empire anymore, but here I am now wondering am I actually going to be able to finish my next battle? I hope someone figures it out soon!

Hmmm, I also have Vista and get random CTD when playing battles but not on the campaign map. I think I have depth of field disabled though.

Just turn off Depth of Field. You are not missing much. It's not a realistic effect in ETW. The idea behind it is the camera (or your eye) can only focus on one object at a time. The surrounding area is blurred. Problem is the game has no way of tracking what your eye is focusing on. The way they implement it in ETW, only the center of the screen is clear. This would imply you only ever look near the center of the screen. For a strategy game this is not true at all. Since there's no easy mouse look camera, you can't easily move the camera to focus on what you may want to see. The only good use for Depth of Field is cinematics and shooters where you move the camera in first person with your eyes.

You may also try some other versions of your graphics driver. For me, any nvidia driver newer than 182.5 seems to cause frequent CTDs in battles. Don't know why it is so hard for the programmers to make the game compatible with different PC & driver setups...

hopefully CA or NVIDIA get ontop of this issue, unless either one of them tell us its our computers fault and what we need to do to fix it, because crashing when you've almost won or lost a battle, really sucks.

DoF is only good if you want to use the first person views on a unit.

anyone else noticed if the 1.5 patch has removed the errors? I'm guessing not, but there always might be a random hope it has!