Sola_III

Those of you seeing these issues - what are your system specs, including OS? Wonder if there are some common characteristics, since some folks don't seem to see the issues.

The "going to bed" suggestion is interesting! I've often got up and used the john/ate lunch. Worse case scenario is Pirates bum - rush me and I'd need to reload my pre - loo save. Hasn't happened yet!

I'm a newbie too (for about 2 weeks now) - the game not RTS in general. I've done some of the suggestions above - start out with Pirates off, one rival faction to start, and tailored them as "easy agressor", "easy resource" etc until I got a feel for the rhythm of the game. Starting to bump up the risk a bit - turning on Pirates and getting a feel for that part of the game. At same time going from small to medium to large maps - just mixing it up a bit by trial and error once

I'm running a Core 2 Duo 1.86 ghz stock clock with a 7600 GT EVGA 256 mb card on XP Home (have Vista too, but haven't installed there). Runs great/looks great. What an awesome game.