New and exotic way to crash the game.
Stardock Forums
I was playing in options with the slider setting that controls how far out the "normal" map zooms before the cloth map cuts in. On my installation the default setting was "86" out of I guess 100. The higher the number the sooner the cloth map cuts in. I wanted to zoom out further for a birds eye view of the world before the cloth map appeared so experimentally set it to "10". I returned to the game and Zoomed WAYYYYY out - but the map became cluttered due to the city names panels not scaling. With the map zoomed way out and the "normal" map being displayed I went back into options and changed the zoom setting "50". I returned to the game and after about 30 seconds the game locked my 32 bit XP system completely. Had to turn it off and turn it on again (RAID checking for next couple of hours - again - sigh).
OK - in retrospect I am not surprised the game got confused - going into options from the "normal" map then returning to what it expected was the cloth map after my option change. But it was a bad crash and should be looked at sometime. I am not going to experiment to see if it is repeatable.
Software developers should NEVER underestimate the brilliance, ingenuity and sheer invention that end users seem to bring to bear on destroying their software creations 
Elemental Forums