I play the game for 3 or more hours every day. I've been playing it about 45 day. Prior to this game I used to play Rome TW vanilla. I've also played Medieval 2 total war, also kingdoms expansion. also tried empire total war and also played alexander. I beat all these games. Some of them, like kingdoms exp I played as all 4 factions and alexander I've beat 2-3 times on both game modes. My PC runs all of those games quite well but they do crash occasionally. EB crashes twice (conservatively) as much as those other titles. In each and every one of these titles I constantly save, because crashes could come at any transition.

Battlefield 2 crashes once every 6 months. Battle for middle earth 2 (I just played through last month) never crashed once. Internet explorer rarely crashes, say I use it for 10 hours a day, It usually will only crap out once a day when a bunch of tabs are running large scripts. What I mean to say is, I don't think that my PC is the problem.

It crashes sometimes when battles are loading up right as the transition music begins. Sometimes it crashes right after I win and I click the accept button (really sucks after an epic 2 hour heroic victory). Sometimes it crashes right in the middle of battles. Usually these crashes are not replicable. So I just reload the game and play the battle again. Or play the battle a couple of turns later and just seige for a little longer (if applicable). One other thing that I think may be noteworthy: The prompt is over-actively popping up telling me to activate the EB script. Which I do. But then it pops up again and again, on the same play session.

I don't want to be mean and I don't want to be ungrateful for your help, but when you say EB is very sable and that this it is not the buggiest game I've ever tried to play, well, lets just say, I disagree. Further, you're surely correct when you point out the # of settlements is a factor.