I skimmed a bit of this thread, and I have a few things to say:
Those who argue that it's not their rigs and get offended when people say that it is, need to realize that it is the rigs themselves that cause the issues. Yes, Elemental itself has some issues with design that makes it less flexible as far as running on every single machine configuration, but it's also in part because our computers are so diverse. I built my computer myself and while the performance is amazing, I understand that it leads to crashes every once in a while.
Luckily I keep my autosave enabled, and so when the game does crash I just jump right back in because it takes just a minute to reload everything.
Also, I have fewer crashes on the smaller maps. (I love playing on "The Real Feague" or however it's spelled) Larger maps have more resources, more empires, and more monsters, meaning more crashes because every time something happens there's that .01% chance that something's going wrong. If you have 250 things going on at any one time, or during any one turn change (Especially with the multithreaded AI meaning crashes won't always happen at turns) then you've got an increased chance of crashing.
Since the 1.1 mid betas I haven't had OOM crashes - In part because I control my map size, but also, even after 400 turns (I used to only get about 100-200 before OOM) my game memory is still at a steady 1.2gb and the turns end as quickly as the start of the game even with full empires of multiple cities.
There's also those people that claim they've had crashing issues all through the beta (Which, it was a beta for a reason) even though 1.09 wasn't crashing for them. If they suddenly started having issues, then they should have been sending in their debug files.
This isn't something that we as users should be arguing about. It is a program. It works for some people, it doesn't for others. It's fun for some, it isn't for others. That's the end of it. Having a thread erupt out of nowhere that is complaining in such a way about the game is just going to cause people to either join in on trashing the game, or get out soap boxes, or argue about what the other person is doing wrong. I'm not even sure why I'm replying due to the fact that I don't care all that much about any of it. I'm just tired and needed somewhere to rant about something. 