Ok so i am a determined and stubborn person... and i got into the kick to play shogun today, but couldn't play it because of random crashings at almost the start of the game... (turns out it was crashing 3-4 turns in at the season harvest everytime, among other places). So this was a problem with the sound/video or the likes.... i tried alot of things... new video drivers, patches, other versions of files... all to no avail... So with alot of playing around i found out what the problem was, which seems to be a problem with alot of people that noone has pointed out very often, mostly fixes are for nvidia drivers as far as i could find....
so if you're game is crashing, and it seems to crash when someone should be talking... (let's say in the throne room would be the best way to check... the harvest is another example to go by)... this is what i ended up with as a solution.
It turns out that codec packs have some issue with shogun, concerning the aac_parser
on finding out about this program's function, it turns out to be a directShow/ADTS playback filter.... the solution to this compatibility issue?... sadly it was to uninstall my codec pack...
so if you're having a problem with sound or random crashing and you don't hear/see any updates on crops and revenue vocaly... check and see if you've got a codec package.... i searched my pc for proof the file was there (the file is aac_parser.ax i believe) and in seeing it was in my ace megacodec files folder, i removed the package from the pc and restarted the game, played it to the point it kept crashing... and sure enough it was a harvest information update with voice playback....
so the end point here?... I thought i'd help people out by submitting that audio/video codecs interfeir with shogun: total war gameplay, and if there is a issue, you can try uninstalling the codecs as a fix as well as the other possible fixes
hope this helps, now i'm off to enjoy my game ^^;
for your information I run a dell laptop with ATI drivers, I am now using omega drivers though that didn't fix my gameplay... if you need any help with it i just am on here this one time to share my fix... so feel free to email me at my gmail address.. use sparingly
so, peace all,
-Shad0w