When engaged in a large battle say maybe 50 or more troops vs 50 or more enemy troops, the game will casually crash out back to desktop. The game is no longer running in any form, no swbg.exe or whatever filename in Task Manager process tab, but the music continues to play. Additionally my desktop image looks grainy like its been converted to 16-bit colour. Sometimes this can happen 20 minutes into the game or I can fight for hours and it happens after about 1.5hrs. But overall it's a common issue on my system, as well several people I play with on the zone have this problem, we have also tried playing by IP and the same problem occurs. I have played AoK alot and do not have problems with the original game engine doing this so I think it must be something LEC did... PATCH PLEASE!. I have a dual boot system between Windows2000 SP2, DirectX 8.1 Final and Windows XP Pro. The issue occurs under both operating systems. Other people who have said they have same issue are also using Windows 98 or ME, so is anyone else having this as a common issue?

Hardware rundown:
PIII @ 1.0ghz (Vantec Copperheat Sink)
384mb @ pc133, CAS2 rated
MSI Geforce3
GA-6VX7-4X (Via Apollo Pro A 133 chipset)
Promise ATA100 PCI Controller
Maxtor ATA100 30gb 7200rpm HDD
Maxtor ATA100 45gb 7200rpm HDD
Allied Telesyn BT-2400 PCI Ethernet
RCA Cable Modem
Plextor 2410a CD-RW
Generic 52x CDrom
19" DE-995 monitor
Sound Blaster 512

I had the same crash once. I had been playing for about 2 hours, and was finally about to win a game (I'm new to the AoE world). Game crashed to desktop, thanks for coming out.

Lame.