If you play on Windows, try to set your process affinity to only use 4 cores.

To do that, you can

1. hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc
2. Right Click on Kingmaker
3. Go to details
4. Right Click on Kingmaker
5. Select 'Set Affinity'
6. Make sure only the top 4 Processors are selected, uncheck the others

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For context:

It was impossible for me to play this game for the longest time.
It would crash every 2min, 5min and when the Gods were merciful, 20min.
After which either the game would crash, or I'd get a blue screen, or my entire PC would freeze up and I'd get audio stutter.

I had tried all the other advice, such as:
- switching to borderless window
- verifying files
- downgrading patch versions
- removing mods
- one guy suggested his game wouldn't run on his SSD drive, so I moved the files over to a regular HDD
- tried running the game on Linux on the same machine
- downgrading graphics to low

None of these worked.
Setting affinity has allowed me to play several hours today, though I can't guarantee that this will work tomorrow.

Been 13hrs into the game so far. Hasn't crashed since I started fiddling with the affinity.
I have checked all that, and that was the thing that threw me off. It all came out clean.

Heck, I played Cyberpunk, Hitman 3 and Warhammer 3 before picking this one up.
I'd rate all of those to be far more demanding, yet none of those crashed my PC.

Also, because I sought for a solution for so long, I can assure you that there's been a lot of posts by people with neigh identical problems to the ones I described.

The most recommended solution was to verify the files or change to borderless.
Which hasn't worked for me or them.

I am not excluding the possibility that you might be right, but if you are then a lot of people share the
same problem, which only becomes visible with this game. Which seems unlikely.

I was playing Kingmaker till a friendly system update bricked my computer. In the process of re-installing my game library, all of sudden the only game that gets to the first text splash screen and then CTD is guess which one?

Did all of the above you did and cannot figure it out. Been playing PKing for years on different systems. I wonder if it is the version? 2.17b It's vanilla and the only mods are official DLC. Going to try your affinity trick and hope it works.