A long history of CTD's: please help.

Hi all,
I've been to this forum several times now for the same reason. No matter how I try to install or run EB, after a while my games are always lost to constant and increasing CTD's. The specific scenarios of the crashes vary, but usually they are after one or more battles I have fought during the AI's turn (they attack me, usually while I am besieging their cities). As is usually the case for most people, as soon as I win and select the doomed city's fate, the game crashes. For me, the CTD's don't start occuring until about thirty or forty years into a campaign, but once they do start occuring, they happen more and more frequently as time passes. It gets to the point where I must do every single battle twice or three times, which makes playing the game pointless. As far as I know, I have followed the installation guide to the letter, applied all the fixes, and followed all the hints (not playing sessions longer than two hours, waiting till the post-battle music ends, not saving during the AI's turn when they attack me, etc). I must be doing something consistently wrong, because this is the fifth or sixth time this has happened, and going through the whole uninstall reinstall process over and over is getting to be more painful than it's worth. I believe I have done everything correctly, and I have even had someone more computer savy than I (my dad!) checking everything, and he is under the same impression. I will post my saves for my most recent campaign, and I would greatly appreciate it if some patient soul would be willing to help me diagnose this reoccuring issue and solve it once and for all. Thanks in advance,
Stelios

http://www.axifile.com?8807707
http://www.axifile.com?1488592
http://www.axifile.com?1786685
http://www.axifile.com?4293912

P.S.- These crashes are not consistent. I can get past them if i just reload the game before the battle(s), but doing that over and over again is irritating and I cannot believe that is what everyone playing EB has to do.

I know exactly what you mean, but most of the time i simply don´t get in such situation when i have to play more than 50 years, at least not with smaller factions. Playing with "big empires" might differ, but i mostly lose the drive, since it´s becoming too macro mamagement heavy, additional to the whole battles.

Though, not a real help in your case, you still could try to avoid those situations ( like let the AI reinforcements attack you during the siege, for example ). You can always determine the battles which would be fought, not the AI, and if it makes the game harder than even better, i´d say. If you are not playing on VH campaign difficulty, you can always autoresolve, provided your general has enough command stars. Even on vh or h you can still use the "autowin_attacker" cheat to take a settlement while autoresolving, so you´d concentrate your skills on really tricky large battles, which is actually a bit more relaxing. Just follow Sun Zi´s advice and fight only battles which you are going to win, no trying to take any opportunity to beat the AI, which is pointless anyway, imo ;)

If the crashes aren't persistent my first advice would be to change the exe to either BI or ALEX, they are far more stable...
Check the unofficial mod section on how to install them properly.

XSamatan