Great I will
To answer
the bots question, I just encountered the first unspecified CTD after all the ai factions ended their turn (aka at the beginning of the player's faction or maybe at the end of the slaves). It is pretty much the same as before and happens in my games when:
- I fight a battle (there is something fishy with the transition between campaign map and battles)
- and then I conquer this region, after that the CTD happens pretty often at the end of the AI's turn
But after reloading everything works nice again. I suspect it has something to do with using Vista because this kind of CTD never happened as long as i used WinXP. Maybe something with how the files are processed between battles and the campaign map and something get's "lost" in between. Or maybe the AI want's to follow it's old instructions regarding campaign expansion/behaviour and then, due to the newly changed ownership of the region I took, the calculation is not right any more and it crashes.
My suggestion, and how I live with this, is to save
every year and then, after a fought battle,
I save again in a different slot. So the worst I can loose is the 1 minute time for the AI's turn.