Fresh M2/SS 6.4 installation crashes to desktop every other turn

[Arcaeca]

I have asked this multiple times in other places but have not gotten a solution yet. I bought a new laptop (old one died) and transferred the old SSD over, but found the M2 (and some other games like Civ4) would crash to desktop mid-launch on the new laptop. "Medieval 2 has encountered an unexpected error and will now exit"; Civ4 gave a somewhat more useful error message, something about the render initialization failing due to not being able to fetch the desired full screen resolution. After finding in System Information that the RTX 3050 this laptop came stocked with apparently has no resolution associated (???), I "fixed" this Civ4 launch problem by going into the NVIDIA control panel > Global Settings and choosing the integrated Intel GPU as the preferred processor, not the 3050. This also allows M2 to launch.

But... M2 crashes constantly - literally every turn or every other turn, without exaggeration. There does not seem to be any pattern in when it crashes - sometimes it's entering a battle, sometimes it's mid-battle, sometimes it's exiting a battle, sometimes it's a diplomacy screen closing, sometimes it's the AI turn processing completely off-screen, sometimes it's just putting something in a city's production queue. Usually this is accompanied by "Medieval 2 has encountered an unexpected error and will now exit", but a significant amount of time it simply crashes to desktop with no error message, and pressing Print Screen to document a bizarre graphical glitch (attached) caused it to immediately a throw a "fatal graphics error" message and crash.

• Yes, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling M2. This was actually the first thing I tried when I found it didn't launch; I thought maybe some files were corrupted. The download is from Steam so IINM this negates the need to manually install the patch. The SS 6.4 installation is only a couple days old.
• Yes, I applied the 4GB patch to both medieval2.exe and kingdoms.exe.
• Yes, I'm running kingdoms.exe and the SS_Launcher.exe in compatibility mode for Windows 7.
• Yes, I'm running kingdoms.exe and the SS_Launcher.exe as an administrator.
• Yes, I updated the graphics card drivers. I even used DDU to completely wipe both the Intel and NVIDIA drivers and then installed new ones direct from Intel and NVIDIA, the ones they recommend for Windows 10 x64 RTX 30 series. The NVIDIA driver is version 537.13 and all of about 2 weeks old - I'm fairly sure it's not simply an outdated driver. Then again, I'm not totally sure the RTX 3050 is even doing anything - even when the preferred GPU is set to NVIDIA or auto-select, Task Manager consistently shows 0% RTX 3050 usage no matter what I'm doing. (And yes, I did even try going into BIOS to see if the preferred GPU has to be set there - no such option.)
• No, there is nothing in the logs folder.

Also very annoying, but not game breaking is that 1) even though I specifically selected the option to not show AI moves when starting the campaign, every single time I reload the save this preference gets forgotten and I have to re-enable it in the game options, and 2) the general's death cinematic, which didn't happen in SS on my old laptop, seems to have come back for some reason and I don't know how to re-disable it, there doesn't seem to be an option.

Please, please someone help. I'm so tired of having to re-launch the game every 5 minutes because it can't make it all of 3 consecutive turns without crashing to desktop, I've tried everything I can think of to mitigate it, and nothing has worked.

[sullivanclan1]

I have never had that problem before> My main vanilla m2tw and my mods never had that issue. I wouldn't know what to do to solve it. Can you post this problem in the channel for m2tw modders? They may be able to help you with your problem. Here is the link for the server. https://discord.gg/TGrxeJEJ

[Arcaeca]

I had a look at the server and I'm not sure why these would be the people to ask, since I'm not trying to develop a mod. There doesn't even seem to be a channel for general troubleshooting.

I did manage to stop showing AI moves by directly editing the M2 preferences file. The constant crashing persists though.