Bought the game here recently, which would be the 3rd time I've bought this game. I wanted to play this version over HE as HE has some weird AI characteristics and that godawful Ubisoft launcher.

Was also under the impression that this version of Gold would be more stable than the boxed copy.

Initial testing was good. I played an existing game for 2 hours without a crash. Looked stable, great! Generating new maps and some minor modifications later, it would crash randomly every 20 minutes or so around Patrician level.

Reluctantly went back to HE. Mirrored the exact same seed, settings and modifications. Game has not crashed once in over 10 hours. In fact HE has never crashed for me since I bought it. HE is actually a lot more responsive too. Loads ways quicker and gameplay is very smooth.

Just a heads-up that people should take the "verified stability" with a grain of salt.


This Gold version is likely capable of playing smaller maps against weaker AI, but for me it freaks out on Huge maps against hard AI. Also has very little tolerance for modding.

You can use a generic Large Address Aware patch on the executable to make any 32-bit version able to access all your memory.

Wow I got a reply. Would have been nice if GoG notified me about this.

Thanks but the problem isn't strictly related to LAA it's due to the persistent memory leak in the 32-bit version. 4gb patch was the first thing I tried.

I've tried all 3 versions of this game extensively. HE was the only version that was completely stable both vanilla and modded.

The issue likely won't be evident unless you play huge maps against several hard AI.