I didn't figure it was the game as such.  I was wondering if a thousand+ frigates + an old 1gb video card might be a problem.

Nevermind.. need to pay closer attention to what i'm posting to.

How much ram do you have?

And what is your processor?

yeah, with those specs, it doesn't really sound like you are gonig to have issues, especially if it is an i7

Mine did the same thing When I had about 18k, putting them into army's caused it to slow down to about 1 frame per second, lasted about a minute. Then crash.

Just for kicks, I loaded a save game, crushed the AI at 14k, then hit keep playing until I had about 20k frigates and told them all to attack move at the same time. It crashed. Very sad.

So, you're not alone. It was fun watching brutes destroy some juggernauts.

My hardware is an Nvidia 1080 TI, Intel 8086k, 64 gig ram.

oh, make sure your drivers are up to date too.

Yup, the crashes have always been when I had a lots and lots of frigates on the move--sitting still doesn't crash.  How could you command 20k units at once?  I find there's a limit of how many are selectable that's far, far lower than that.  In the big battles I end up sending out group after group from wherever I have the factories set to deliver them.

I suspect there's a hard limit somewhere in the pathfinding logic, too many units getting in each other's way and it exceeds the limit and crashes rather than handling it gracefully.

I was naive enough to think that my new ASUS gaming laptop will be able to handle to over 15K frigates in one army without any trouble. Man i was wrong, and now i found out it's not just me but pretty much a common problem.

I will upgrade my hardware and will wait for the wemod version of the game. 

I don't think it's a case of the hardware not being able to handle it.  After seeing edward14's post I realized the crashes have always involved large numbers of frigates trying to get somewhere.  A large pile of frigates at a rally point never goes boom, sending a few groups (the max you can select) through an area (especially a chokepoint) and you're risking a crash.  I had it happen in my last game and doubt there were more than 1,500 frigates of mine on the map when it blew.  However, all were either heading for the rally point or attacking  a node in a saddle.  I would say maybe half of them were entering the saddle when it crashed.

This leaves me with a strong suspicion that the real problem is in resolving what happens when two units want to go through the same space while there are a bunch of other units in the vicinity so going around isn't a simple proposition.  This is inherently a thorny issue and my guess is that something in that conflict resolution exceeds some hard limit in the code and goes boom.

It would only appear with frigates because they pack in far more than the bigger units, thus you can get far more contention for the bottleneck with them than with the bigger stuff.

Another observation that points strongly towards it being a pathfinding issue.

This time there was no large mass of frigates anywhere on the map.  There was, however, a large mass of harvesters.  My radioactives income wasn't going up despite harvesters on repeat build and ordered to a radioactive node.  Investigation showed that the pile around the node had grown too big, the ones on the outside couldn't figure out what to do.

This was my best radioactive node but I figured sending some to another inferior node was better than them goofing off.  While the selected ones were trying to get underway, boom.