Quote Originally Posted by Dhepee View Post
I've been playing since the first MTW and I've been on this site for ages - even was an assistant mod in the Tavern GAH.

Here are the top two causes of bugs in MTW:

1) Not enough system resources/system not good enough. These games are system hogs. If you don't have stuff, the game will invariably crash.

2) Plenty of system resources but your computer has viruses, old file fragments, or weird stuff going on with the file structure that all lead to overuse of what would normally be ample system resources.

Just my two cents.
You are unfortunately entirely incorrect. None of these have ever caused bugs in any CA release. There is no virus that specifically rewrites your TW game to crash when you try to move a ship. There is no video card that is deciding that clicking the check-box when any faction declares war on you is wrong the 37th time it happens (and every time afterwards). Sure, there were specific video configuration that didn't let you turn on various features or exacerbated actual bugs in TW.

Despite being a huge resource hog, the game does a decent job of tuning itself down for systems and worst case, the first time you try a full stack battle you figure out if you need to put everything to minimal. These are not what anyone is complaining about -- we knew we couldn't stick it on a 386 and do full antialiased volumetric explosions. We may wish we could get the game and pretty as it can be, but that is not causing our trade fleets and fort walls to not be actionable under reproducible circumstances. The AI is not marching 5 stacks of units up and down the coast because your PS/2 mouse driver is out of date and that's why it can't perform naval transport.

Nobody is expecting that they can play the game for 100 hours straight without seeing the background rendering get screwed up and having to restart the game every now and then. It's a complex piece of software and happens. When almost everyone is getting corrupted save games after a few dozens turns, it's not because they only have a Core2Duo.