Ok, so I got Sins today, and after all of the tutorials I start to play the single player campaign. I start out with the NPC empire on easy, and the game loads at a steady pace until about 3/4 done. Then it freezes for a minute and goes to the game. Sometimes I even here the game sound FXs in the bakground while the load screen is still up. Then it cuts to the game, but I can't do anything. Not even move the cursor. After a minute or 2 of this, it works for a couple seconds, and then freezes again. After about 5 minutes of this, the game then runs normal for a minute or 2, and then crashes. It does this on any map I select, and happens even after I change all of the other settings.

I don't have this problem on any other difficulty setting, but those are a little too hard for a beginner like me. So, any suggestions? System specs:

Sins is v 1.05

NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 256 MB RAM

AMD Athlon 4200+ 2.2 GHz dual core

1 GB RAM

Windows XP SP 3 (32 bit)