You might wish to report this directly to Stardock via a ticket (many of us have reported lock ups and hangs on this level already).
One other thing to be aware of is how much RAM you have on your system. On my PC, with 16GB RAM, I have seen the OS assign as much as 6GB RAM to back up the virtual memory being used by everything I have running on it, including the game with a huge galaxy, all start up options set to values I expect to use maximum memory, and all 4 opponents, and this is only through the early game play. If you only have 4GB RAM you could be experiencing some serious (even crippling) page swapping.
