Regarding the MAFs issues I was having on the GEM, I managed to fix them, at least for now. Since Toffer could autoplay my save without MAFs it was clear that the issue was on my side, and perhaps it could be fixed. Keeping in mind the weird DX9 error I got a couple of times, hinting at some graphical issue, I set most graphics options on medium, in particular what seemed to make the biggest difference was enabling low resolution terrain. In any case, I also resized Windows memory paging again, to 8-16GB, as I read on Microsoft forums that it could help with general applications' memory errors. Maybe these further tweaks can be helpful to other players as well.
I was then able to play another good 80 turns before I had another normal MAF on turn processing. However, interestingly enough, I'm guaranteed to get a MAF if I do a recalc (unless I do it as soon as the savegame loads); I'm also getting repeatable MAFs if I load into the game and then try to load a previous save (save scumming is bad anyway).
I knew from the start that I would never be able to finish a game on the GEM, but I'll see how far this one goes and keep that in mind when setting up a new game.
