Far as I know mid-battle CTD's are exceedingly rare. I would suggest that you review your specs, and of course whatever background processes you have running when playing EB. See if there's *anything* you can kill off - assuming you don't multitask and perform complex admin tasks whilst playing EB, there really should be very little needed to run. And everything else is at that point just a waste of resources (cpu time, ram, etc.). Especially 'tray' applications/'helpers'/'quick launchers' silently consume quite a bit of RAM. Especially under Win Vista as it has a habit of caching programs ... which is great when doing lots of low-demand work (coding), as it'll speed up transition from program x to program y; but it's horrible if you don't have much RAM to spare and are doing resource-intensive jobs (working with photoshop/playing EB...).

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Lately, the closest I ever got to mid-battle ctd's in EB was when a Pontic king was slain (together with his heir apparent and another high ranking family) by my Seleukid forces: instead of CTD'ing the game simply got 'stuck' in the action (you know when the game zooms in so you can't control your battle anymore but have to wait until you get back, always right when you wanted to orded x or y?). Well I did have a nice background to look at; but eventually if forced a CTD by CTRL+ALT+DEL.

Anyways from time to time I just hit ALT+F4 as a quicker means of exiting the game... will fight another day...