For me, the crash is most likely to happen just after loading the game. If there are notifications active, an almost sure way to trigger one is to just click on a couple. The super-fast map scroll coupled with having to load textures coupled with displaying that gold selection aura causes a crash almost every time.
I've had the exact problem as well, game locks up, with certain notifications, sending the view instantaneously across a huge map. However in my instance, the crash occurs only from a high elevation, low magnification of the map.
On systems with less video/system RAM available, I imagine that would happen much more frequently, as whatever cache is being emptied would likely have to do so more often.
Which may explain why in my case, the game freezing occurs only from a high elevation opposed to low elevation of the map. These problems definitely point to how the VRAM cache is implemented in a huge map, may not be optimized, leading to memory leaks, or errors. The crashes may be attributed to the lack of on board memory and the combination of how the VRAM cache operations are regulated, but since this problem is present when I am running 2GB GTX 460s, with others experiencing the same problem it seems more on the software than hardware. Hopefully, the next patch will resolve this problem among the other bugs and improvements necessary for this game.
well - the strategic view certainly helps, but then I could play Civ I for the same grafic features.
and it still crashes once you switch back to "normal mode". For "save" play you would have to switch to strategic view whenever you move the camera...
it helped reduce the crashes I got in the beginning of each turn to switch to strategic view at the end of each turn... but this is less than a workaround, since it still crashes and reduces grafic to 1980s ...
I also had crashes switching from strategic view to the 3D environment, but only from viewing the 3D environment from the a high elevation (lowest magnification), haven't had an crash yet scrolling across the normal map view at the lowest elevation (highest magnification) - although it will lag at times especially in a highly developed area with many cities and units. However, for scrolling across large distances in a huge map, I will still perform the action in strategic view, and switch to normal view. I've also noticed while monitoring the GPU activity and temperatures, that it seems to idle while in strategic view, and activity jumps instantaneously as it begins to render the huge map in normal view, this level of idle/activity in strategic view differs significantly from what I've observed with the activity when starting the application, and loading a saved game. Additionally, I've also had issues loading a huge map saved game. Crashes are persistent with huge map saved games that were saved after all unit orders are issued, right before one would initiate the next turn. What I see during the crash is a view of my civilization from highest elevation, with rendering incomplete at the outer edges of the screen. However, saving a huge map right after a turn, hovered over a selected unit that requires an order, seems to allow me to successfully load the map, as the view after loading a saved game is centered around that particular unit at a low elevation.
