after some digging the poster above me is right it does not matter how strong your computer is the game has limits as this other poster wrote As far as reaching around 3GB and then crashing, as I understand it the game is a 32 bit application and has an internal limit on the amount of ram that can be used. Despite having more system ram, the game will still crash when this limit is reached. Reducing eye candy (hi-res textures & hi-poly meshes) can help. Reducing mods that utilize lots of scripts especially constant polling update cycles can help as well ---- this is my rig I got from digital stormonline . com http://www.digitalstormonline.com/comploadode.asp?id=691720&price=%242%2C499 its a lil outdated now that the titans have come out but it will allow me to blow this and rome two total war out of the water so im happy