We don't like getting yelled at by customers who run into some problem any more than you like running into problems.  And we especially get no joy out of people making forum posts that ignore the stickies proclaiming the game is buggy.  Let me put it like this, if the game crashes on you, we consider that unacceptable.  But you can be certain that the game shipped with plenty of testing to make sure it doesn't crash. We've only encountered two crash bugs since release that were due to bugs in our code, the rest have been old drivers, bad drivers, etc. (and people wonder why developers like consoles).

So below is a list of things we've compiled that cause people problems and how to work around them.

Whenever you have some problem, you should look at your debug.err which is created in the game's directory.  This will tell you a lot about your system.  I'm going to put this vaguely in the order of what causes a problem.

#1 Game crashes immediately.

Happens to approximately 2.5% of users.

Most common cause: Running your desktop at below 1024x768 or running your desktop in 16-bit color.  This resolves 99% of users.

#2 Game crashes randomly while playing!

Happens to approximately 2.5% of users.

Most common cause: People with older video drivers. We weren't kidding, you MUST HAVE A RECENT (past year) set of video drivers. If you don't, the game will crash randomly. The readme says this. The stickies say this. We're not kidding around here. You must update your video drivers. Ignoring all that and running into the forum and saying "How could they ship this piece of #$@#!" is not going to update your video driver. You must update the video driver. 

Ex: If you're running the nvidia 81.95 drivers, update them to 81.98 or better.

You also absolutely must be running at 1024x768 or higher. That means both X and Y must be equal to or greater than those two numbers.

Next most common cause: People who have eliminated their page file or have a very small page file.  That's your virtual memory.  Check the debug.err and near the top it will say how much virtual memory you have allocated. If it's less than a gig (heck, nowadays you should have at least 2 gigs for virtual memory) then there's your problem.

Next most common cause: Overheating. The game's 3D engine has no polygon count, no texture limit. It's designed so that even 2 years from now, you can with mods plug in advanced textures. Some modders have already put in ships from popular sci-fi movies that have over a million polygons and it works.  But it comes at a cost: Your video cards are fully utilized. And that can translate to heat.  This mostly affects people who have built their own machines and thrown in a powerful video card.  Version 1.0X (and later) support GPU throttling which should solve this.

Next most common cause: People with AMD64 Dual Core who haven't updated their chipset drivers. GO here, get your drivers, play game, have fun.

#3 Game crashes when I save a ship design.

THIS one is our bug.  Cause: If the player selects a planet from the GNN dialog, clicks on the star port, clicks on the shipyard, builds ship, it will die in 1.0.  Basically the Z-order of the windows gets confused.  Obviously, nobody in the beta/gamma/RCs ever tried to build a ship this indirectly (we just clicked on the shipyard icon).  It was fixed essentially immediately.  You'll need to download the update or not go to the shipyard via all those dialogs.

#4 Game crashes when I invade a planet once in a great while when playing as a custom race.

THIS is also our bug. It only occurs when you play as non-human and only once in a very great while. Fixed in 1.0X. Though at this point, we're talking cases that can be counted on one hand.

#5 You lose your mouse pointer

People with nVidia Geforce 6X series cards (for the most part) have reported this. We have yet to get it in our internal lab and it doesn't seem to be that wide spread but it's a real show stopper.  The solution is to use the hardware mouse cursor which is in the video options area of the game.

OTHER TIPS:

Read the stickies! Post your debug.err.  Or at the very least tell us what kind of computer you have (though debug.err will tell us all about your computer).