i've never mini-dumped once in any release version of Sins or Entrenchment. fix your computer in my opinion.
Have know some mini dump... with map having 10 star and more that 500 planets... with a fleet having more that 15000 ship... or at the very begin, when Sins was launched due to a bad Nvidia driver ( problem was on the Nvidia side )...
For the majority of people, Sins work good... for a few, with problem, devs work on it... not long time ago, a sync bug was resolved, only a few people was having these bug revelead... don't forget that Sins is around one year old... and in one year, alreay a lot of thing was fixed... take a look at the change log of all sins version... it is a huge amount of work...
In the readme.txt from sins, you can read :
* If you're using Windows Vista, you MUST have speakers or headphones plugged in or the
game will crash.
* Folding@Home will cause the game to crash. Please exit the Folding application before playing.
* If you have a USB Missile Launcher, please detach it before playing the game or it will
crash the game.
My turn to add something to these list... if you have a phenom multicore processor and your are using Vista, you will maybe not have enough power for the game... solution is to downgrade to XP or upgrade to the Phenom II... why ?
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3492&p=6
In theory, the AMD design made sense. If you were running a single threaded application, the core that your thread was active on would run at full speed, while the remaining three cores would run at a much lower speed. AMD included this functionality under the Cool 'n' Quiet umbrella. In practice however, Phenom's Cool 'n' Quiet was quite flawed. Vista has a nasty habit of bouncing threads around from one core to the next, which could result in the following phenomenon (no pun intended): when running a single-threaded application, the thread would run on a single core which would tell Vista that it needed to run at full speed. Vista would then move the thread to the next core, which was running at half-speed; now the thread is running on a core that's half the speed as the original core it started out on.
This is only a example who show that a top machine can be slow when some conditions are meet... devs cannot test a game on all the hardware/software configuration who exist... Since sins was out, we have know problem with Nvidia driver ( fault was at the nvidia side ), problem with Vista ( Vista have release a KB who help the performance problem for sins and several other game, keep your system updated ), problem with Phenom processor and Vista running single-threaded application ( sins is mainly one core application, problem is processor )... so, already a few case where Stardock is not responsible...
Now, if some of you have problem with sins, in place of simply complain... maybe together, you can push Stardock to use a Bugzilla like system ( posting on forum don't really give a clear idea of problems ) where people are able to put detailed info over the problem, their material, their driver, directx, etc... a bug tools will help the devs to see pattern in some case, see how much people are affected by the problem and give priority to some of them, etc...
Yes, sins is not perfect but they work on it... i simply thing that they miss some organization related to bug report... and that several of the people only complain without given enough information about the problem... why not download the dev exe ( who is free ) and use it during game... once crashed/mini-dump, simply zip it and send it to stardock ( or if you was using a mod, to the responsible of the mod )... the dev exe log everything, from the start to the crash, this in plain text... I think that the vanila sins engine have a debug mode too...
Lefamaster, by the way, your original post was fun... i have good laught... i like humor...
