This game totally snuck up on me. It reminds me a bit of Sins of a Solar Empire with a touch of Warrior Kings (one of my all time favourite RTSs). Looks like I've got my summer sorted, no more nasty vitamin D for me!

But anyway, enough "yay", a question: I've got the latest patch (beta) and I am suffereing horrendous stability issues. I had them before, but they just got worse with the latest patch. Lot's of things trigger it, but not consistently. Zooming in often triggers it, as does using Philip to capture stuff. On average the game lasts for about 10-15 minutes before it hangs and I have to end-process it and start again. Is this to be expected at this stage? Or is something a bit broken?

Specs:
1gig ram
nvidea geforce 6800 (latest drivers)
3.4ghz dual core
OS: xp

I've played 20+ hours without a single issue. Atleast 5-6 hours on the 1.1 beta. I've also done a lot of alt-tabbing while playing. No problems at all.

Stability won't necessarily be the same from system to system. Yours may be fine, mine may be intolerable. Apples, oranges.

The point remains, however, that on my particular system (which is well looked after) the stability is terrible. I've continued to play a bit but it seems to get more and more frequent to the point where it is basically unplayable. Not entirely sure what is causing it any more, almost any input can set it off. It reminds me of problems I have had before where my graphics card just couldn't cope with a particular game and seized up, but the requirements for Hegemony are not especially high so I'm dubious to assume it's the card.

I believe another post suggested taking your drivers back to 186.18 would fix most stability issues. There was a post regarding Demo Stability, which was very similar to your problem.

If you get a crash dump (not end-tasking of course), then you can send it to rob here at longbow and they'll figure it out.

So far, the support has been stellar (what little I've seen has been necessary on the forum), so expect that if they can identify your problem, they'll be fixing it.

I had a crack at rolling back the drivers and it did improve. It takes something in the region of twice as long to seize up and runs a bit smoother.

It was the last straw, so I went and got a long over due new graphics card. It's in the post, so I'll wait until that turns up to play. Hopefully that'll do it

The new graphic card came (asus eah4670) and things are running smoothly. I played it for 2 hours without even a hint of lag or spazing out.

After removing the old 6800s (I had two and forgot, it's been that long!) I noticed one of them was missing a capacitor. That possibly had something to do with the temperamentality of it. Maybe. Anyway, just an FYI so no one wastes too much time on it ;)