I have the same problem with the memory crash occurring the third or fouth time so far. I am playing the beta 4 with heightmaps installed and everything updated to the latest (beta) version. I am playing on a laptop featuring Centrino Duo @1,73Ghz, GeForce Go 7300 256Mb and 1 Gig RAM, my virtual memory was set to 3 Gigs when the crashes occurred, I increased it now to its max capacity of 4096 MB, will see if that helps.

In case the devs want to look into that, I mailed my debug and latest savegame files, the case ID being 37851.

I crashed out 4 different times tonight due to out of memory. I have 2 gigs of ram, it would usually happen when I tried to do a save of any kind, after playing for a couple hours. I notice when I first launch the game the memory footprint is about 900k in size and it grows to as much as 1.7 gigs of ram along with a 1.8 gig page file.

Just to add my 2 cents worth....I have a desktop that's what i would call mid-range...on large and larger maps I had this out of memory situation occur prior to the latest beta. I am currently using my wife's really nice upper range lap top (dual core 2 gig of memory 4 gig pagefile) and the latest beta and am getting this error on a large map about every two hours. Now I've got it timed so when it starts to act a little froggy (not frogboy, froggy), I reload it and lose a turn to the AI.

The graphics and the speed of the lap top make the desktop look really lame, its interesting to see the graphics on a really nice machine. But the out of memory crash....that's really frustrating. And regardless of how many times I read the posts that it deletes the prior file before attempting to save, I still try a manual save after the auto save fails.....there is nothing I hate more in gaming than having to redo a move, let alone several.

Yes, I have now noticed this also.
Not only do the saving fail, but the previous one also magically disapears!

This whole thing actually seems to be much more severe than I thought at first.

I have the same issue where every few turns the game crashes. I've also noticed that the game only uses 1gb of real ram and 2gb of virtual even though I have 2gb real and 4gb virtual, though, that may be a windows limitation. (I'm using Vista btw). So what I do is when the auto save fails, I do a manual one, cause I know I'm gonna crash within 2-4 turns. I haven't tunred the silder down on the planet models yet.

I moved the slider to 0% and saw a drastic difference in crash frequency, and, like Shabitz, no longer due to Out of Memory.

Vista only uses 300mb of ram which is still a ton, but, there's plenty free.

I have a low end system and I am getting this crash as well. It seems to happen only on saving the game for me.

Scincerely,
Scintor

We think this is solved in beta 5.  The other thing to do is download the heightmaps and reduce the planet variety in the  settings.

Last night I ran with 3 changes that I made, the windows manage page file and I turned throttle framerate off in the video options and turned down the planet surface variety slider to 0% . I no longer crash out randomly but I still get the out of memory error when doing a save. I've aslo changed my saves to save every 1 turn. This is kinda annoying because it seems to slow everything down a bit. But now I don't go back 45 minutes after a crash.

One thing I did notice when I got the out of memory error last night. The game was taking up 1.3 gigs of ram , normally it had taken up 1.7 gigs before getting that error. So turning down the planet slider, I don't think that really mattered it still errors at some point. I alt tabbed out to grab my save file and move it to my desktop, then tabbed back in to try to save again, no dice. I then looked at my memory footprint of the game and it was at 1.8 gigs and went non-responsive on me. I had smart exception running but it never detected a dbg file to send.

I'll try the beta 5 files tonight I've got it downloaded on my desktop just wasn't sure if I should try it.

Never mind, when I updated SDC in magically appeared.

I'm seeing the out of memory crash also. For me it's happened only on saves, but it's pretty frequent on a large map. 2 gig RAM, XP Home, DA at 1.59[b].096. I had the heightmaps module installed.