what mission and whats causing it?

only consistently repeatable crash I've dealt with has to do with the plazas, build too many and it crashes

Hi thanks for the reply.
Pirate mission. Settings were visuals 4k all others high. Took the first island to the right. Had a lot of ships. Manual saved to play something else, came back and that save shows the sundial briefly then black screen and crash to desktop.The game had generated crash logs. But, expecting a refund, I uninstalled and hid the game.
The refund has not materialised so I will probably play it again.
Are there any recommended settings to guarantee no crashing regardless of mission?

it might be your pc is too good for the game since its from 09 and something corrupted. happened a couple times to my older games, tech can get weird when its overperforming.

while i cant be sure if will fix the problem i can give what i use and see if that helps. it could be something as simple as changing the resolution to 1920x1080 or lowering the fps cap.

from top to bottom, left to right:
1920x1080 / 60 / off / custom.

low / high / off.
high / high / off
off / low /off
normal / low

i had an unrepeatable issue here where i was randomly losing population and constantly fighting a death spiral until i was able beat it the first time.

just asking, did you try manually saving/loading earlier missions?
was there a windows update in between playing?
did you try validating the game through steam?

Tried again. Just had another crash from mid game with settings all high. PC is 2012 ish but gpu is gtx1080

if you dont mind cheating, type in -winall to win the mission and see if the issue is specific to this mission.

if that fails then something is seriously wrong with your game and im not sure how to help

That crash was mid game on a different mission. I looked at the dump file in notepad and it show a reference to a steam file on a different harddrive to the one the game is installed on.
I shutdown, unplugged that drive and the autosave game before the crash loaded fine and was fine for the past 3 hours.
If i remember rightly there was a stipulation for games needing to be installed on the C: drive but i'm sure that was in the win XP era.

that shouldnt be a problem anymore, i dont use my c drive for steam and everything has worked fine.

well, if its not crashing anymore then problem solved XD

if it does start again you could try asking steam support about it to see if its some weird steam issue or hope someone that actually knows whats up replies while you try to beat the game on a timed hardcore run

ok well just played several hours on the pirate mission, manually saved it and it loaded straight away. We shall see.