no, its always random. i seem to be able to just start the game and wait for it to crash without doing anything. Even on the main menu and loading screens constantly. Then sometimes i can play for as long as 20min without a hitch before it crashes.

has to be a problem on my end. just wish i knew what it was.

You're not alone, I can't play right now either.

Head to the beta forum, and use this guide to post a bug. That will help them fix it.

Well in rebuttal to Raven.

If they know about those problems, they don't usually patch with them. Most people have a different hardware and software configuration and it can be very, very difficult to get it right on the first try. You just can't be sure how your code is going to work with every hardware and software configuration.

Sometimes they just screw up. People aren't perfect, even the guys in internal QA aren't perfect. Bugs get through and hopefully we catch and report them.

Big patches like this last one tend to be even worse. Too much stuff in them for something NOT to go wrong. The more complicated you make it, the more things that can potentially go wrong. If you'd waited two more weeks, odds are you would have gotten an even worse patch because there would be so much more in it to go wrong.

Also, some of us have found ways around things. From the earlier bug report thread linked I was getting far in the game myself because of the intense slow down that could make it take 5 minutes to advance a single turn without events. If you can find a workaround though you can make the "game" work and some very useful information for the QA team. A work around is often a very good description of what exactly is causing the bug.

This isn't a game preview, this is real beta testing in all its "glory".

Be sure to bug report it with all that information!

If we don't tell them the problems, they can't fix them.

Indeed I know all of that. There was a time I was a "professional" Beta tester. Meaning I got paid, cash, to test games for various companies. I've tested games at the EA Tiburon Office that was in Orlando, I've tested games at home for Microsoft, I've been in the closed Beta's for numerous MMOs, and part of my job on UO was to test new items and find bugs for them on the test servers. I know all about being in Beta programs.

For Elemental I actually paid for the privilege to be a Beta tester. I know all about work-arounds as well and I've been looking for them. As far as I can tell the crashes Elemental has with this build are all almost completely random. I can't reproduce most of them either. I'll be playing along just fine, hitting my space bar to pass turns, and suddenly the game locks up for no reason that I can find. If I was being paid to do this I'd have to tell my employer I can't test this product for bugs accurately because it won't stay running long enough for me to do so. Seeing as how I'm actually paying to be able to do it, I'd like to make sure by the time the game comes out these stability issues are Solved. (which I'm sure they will be)

Load Game crashes Every time I try.

Same here, Loading a game crashes to desktop every single time.

This round is a bit rough. I'm sure we will have another like it before beta 1 is over. I think what is sorely needed here is a working autosave so we can continue to test. If they focus on a stable autosave, then a crash doesn't have to be game over.

Then maybe we can start critiquing the game. So far, I have no idea what they are trying to do with the economic system because I have to start over before 30 turns. I thought I saw some goods being sent by road, not sure why.

Im getting pretty far, maybe a dozen cities, 400 or so turns go by pretty quick. I cant tell but i think the AI cities dont have a max pop, i just let em grow a bit then take over the ones ai builds. Free really big cities.

I know its atleast one caravan per city. But anyone know if you can get more that that. Say city A and B are connected. I have A building a road and B building a road, they seem to take different paths. Does that create 2 caravans per city? I never get far with caravans because critters keep raiding my routes.

Yay.. with new patch i havent crashed at all! BUT! it seems i "run out of memory" which seems unlikely. I have 8gig ram and this game barely touches my comps ablities. It IS the evil Gremlins!

Everyone else have big black squares over the honey resources?

What OS do you have? I have x64 Vista Ultimate, and I am still having crashes [even in XP compatibility mode], in fact I cannot even complete a game, because when a caravan appears on the map, my game locks up immediately, so I have to kill the .exe after CTRL-ALT-DEL. Annoying...

I can play Elemental for as long as I want, as long as I never build any cities! I even managed to win once as such - none of the other AIs did anything so I wandered around with my sovereign and killed them one by one... But the moment I try to build a city and then end my turn, freeze. It also freezes if I conquer someone else's cities and then try to end turn.

So basically all I can do is explore, kill spiders, trolls, swamp bandits and wolves, and collect gold, those healing potions, and the two types of rings that seem to be in the game. Oh, and kill other sovereigns. Sigh Alas, not much for me to test...

I also can't even browse around in the Kingdom Info screen (even though I can't ever have a kingdom...) - the game freezes if I click that button