Ori, I really appreciate your help.
I copied and saved the dxdiag but haven't gotten around to attaching and sending it back to you yet. I'll follow up on that ASAP.
I have some interesting news too. I followed the instructions to turn off the automatic shutdown. Then I started playing the game to see if I could get an error message. And wouldn't you know, I played for several hours without any problem. That's never happened before. It makes me wonder if there was a real error or something that the computer was reading as an error. I probably shouldn't speculate because I don't know that much about computers, hardware and software.
I dont think I'm out of the woods yet. My laptop has what I consider to be a monster Nvidia graphics card with a gigabyte or more of RAM. I think it was one of the highest quality cards I could get for the laptop. Other games play great in 1920 x 1080. And yet the Civilization games automatically drop my graphics resolution down to a lower setting 1280 x 720. It does this at the start up. And in so doing, I also lose visual access to the very bottom and very top of the play screen. So for instance, I can't see my research/commerce slider, the indicator of what I'm researching and number or date of my turn. I also can't see things on the bottom of the screen, like I tried at one point to change religions and didn't have access to the "convert button." I had to go into preferences and change the resolution in order to get access to it. I should mention that I'm running an HDMI cable out of the laptop into a 48" HDMI screen (if that matters).
thanks again for your help!
Does anyone have any ideas or can you direct me to other threads that cover this?
