CTD ruining what should be a great game

Having played and loved Rome Total War I couldn't turn down revisiting the franchise with the Empire/Napoleon Total War Game of the Year Edition Bundle.

I had numberous problems with Empire which I just gave up on but I'm now deeply disappointed by the more up to date title Napoleon.

The Game had been crashing randomly, often at the end of land/sea battles, no matter what the graphic settings. Now the game will start but when I go to continue campaign the game crashes to the desktop while on the loading screen.

I have tried everything I have been able to find on these forums including the bcdedit thing and various other things to no avail. My hardware (which I doubt is the problem) is as follows:

CPU: AMD Phenom II 965 BE C3 @ 3.92Ghz (EK Supreme HF)
Motherboard: MSI GD70, NB @ 2600Mhz
PSU: Corsair HX850 with MDPCX Braiding
RAM: 2 x 2Gb Corsair Dominator DDR3 @ 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24
GPU: ATI Radeon HD5870 @ 1000Mhz core, 1300Mhz memory (EK 5870 Waterblock)
HDD: 1 x 80Gb Intel G20 V2 SSD
2 x 500Gb Samsung Spinpoint F3
Soundcard: Asus Xonar D2X
Wireless Card: Edimax Wireless Adapter

Cooling: Full Custom Watercooling (see here)
Case: Custom Lasercut & Powdercoated Coolermaster ATCS840.

All Overclocks are tested and fully stable for 24/7 use.

OS: Windows 7 64bit

Does anyone have any suggestions before I ditch the frachise forever?

Cheers

The Howster

All Overclocks are tested and fully stable for 24/7 use.

Have you tested Empire and Napoleon without the overclocks?
Have you also installed direct9.0c, C++ 2005 SP1, and .Net 4 manually?

I have downclocked to see if it made a difference but it didn't. Also these overclocks are prime 95 and furmark stable and the system trounces through other games including metro 2033, crysis, BF:BC2.

I have installed DX9.0c even though it seemed pointless since DX11 supercedes it. As for the other two surely windows 7 has those or newer versions built in? And if not why does the game not include these if they are necessary to run the game?

Just tried C++ 2005 SP1 and .Net 4 with no luck

Originally Posted by The Howster

I have downclocked to see if it made a difference but it didn't. Also these overclocks are prime 95 and furmark stable and the system trounces through other games including metro 2033, crysis, BF:BC2.

This is a different animal as far as a stress test except maybe the newest multicore games. The mantra has been since Empire was released it hates overclocks.

I have installed DX9.0c even though it seemed pointless since DX11 supercedes it. As for the other two surely windows 7 has those or newer versions built in? And if not why does the game not include these if they are necessary to run the game?

They try but the way some people including me have their security settings, they get left on Steam's servers not knowing this game is still XP made and needs XP drivers. Don't beilive all of Microsoft's hype about dx11 as they did not make it backward compatible with dx9 and older.

Just tried C++ 2005 SP1 and .Net 4 with no luck

Have you tried turning off the background programs, playing with the graphics settings? Got a defragger running in the background? Alt-tab a lot?

I have turned off all non essential background tasks. I don't bother defragmenting. I alt tab on the odd game like rgs but not during this game. I've had the graphic settings up, down and all over to no avail. It may well be that the game is now stable after doing everything and my save has corrupted. I'll give a new campaign a run in and see how it goes.

It's the game. Almost all my friends have the CTD issue as well. Nothing much you can do about it I'm afraid. Turing down graphic settings could make the issue appear less frequent but doesn't fix it.
Not to mention how hard it sucks to play on crappy graphic settings with a good pc.

As far as I see it, the game code is just unstable somehow. To me it appears to have worsened since the release of the Peninsular Campaign.