Empire: Total War Troubleshooting

This is something out of the ordinary in my blog, but I think something people would like the answer to nonetheless.
When playing Sega’s latest game, you may encounter a series of crashes (in vista: the game has stopped working). Here’s some workarounds and tips.
If you play multiplayer, try both having a different legal version. This has been a burden the entire series. If you’re playing alone, try going into offline mode in steam (I’ve read this elsewhere and well may decrease the number of crashes). Then there’s the people who advise you to reinstall windows untill you get it working and than not touch anything anymore and be happy. If this feels a bit too much, try my approach. This is what happened to me and how I fixed it.
First, I couldn’t finish chapter two in the road to independance. There was bug which blocked the rest of the map off. I started playing grand campaign instead. After beginning my second grand campaign, I encountered far too many crashes causing me to save more, which in turn turned out to be corrupt a lot of the time (entire batches), causing me to save even more. After finishing this campaign, I decided to reinstall. Again, as with the original installation, the cd’s were read way too fast -even for my computer- and I assume the entire game was downloaded through steam. It didn’t seem to crash anymore though!
I started the road to independance again, hoping to get better results. Again, the same thing happened, but in between it was obvious there was more than the black shrouds of mist. So I restarted the mission in chapter II. I restarted and restarted again untill I followed the instructions more carefully, this couldn’t have taken over a couple of hours of playing (there aren’t many choices, so you just click and press enter). I have now finishe that chapter and moved on to United States (if you win the rts battle you’ll get a “Following” if not, “Despite” as the first word of your advisers’ info after the cutscene).
In short, don’t reinstall if you need bandwith. Save and restart games if they crash or are bugged. Entire batches could be corrupt though.
I hope this helps.