This issue now seems to be fixed in the 1.68.154.1220 November 2020 patch.
Thanks all for confirming it now seems to be fixed. If you start experiencing issues again please post 🙂
Updating Catalina seems to have made the game playable. I've been building for about 5-10 minutes without the CPU crashing out. I usually wait a week or two to update Catalina/MacOSX because of rare instances of bugs making my primary work software (which is small development teams rather than huge houses) crash, so I've just kinda gotten into the habit of waiting a while before diving into updates unless they're necessary.
I updated to latest version of Catalina (I was one behind) and then I did a repair game, and the symptoms have *mostly* disappeared. I am still getting some annoying game lag, but instead of taking the entire system out, it freezes for a second or two before recovering... which is MUCH better. I can play rather than reboot my system constantly.
But here are the system specs just for curiosity's sake:
iMac Pro 2017.
Processor: 3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon W
Ram: 32 GB 2666 MHz DDR4
Graphics: Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB
Catalina version, which seems to have fixed it enough to be playable: 10.15.6 (19G2021)
Also, I never play in Windowed mode, so anything dealing with windowed mode can be eliminated, and my game is mostly set up to default settings, and I have no mods installed at current. The only options I've changed is making sims live long lives.
Well, I got an hour of play testing in before it crashed again this time. So updating significantly helped but didn’t fully fix. Buuuttt, I can live with that. Here’s hoping EA fixes their game more than adds new bugs with the next patch. Oy.
and no I couldn’t get any screenshots. System completely froze and became non-responsive.
There's no crash reports; the system is rebooted through the power button because it freezes up, and I'm futzing with this during breaks of my day job. (I don't have time to sit and wait for an hour to see if it crashes out to give an error report.)
But... thanks a lot for the help. I have a migraine, so... I can't test any more for now because I can't do moving graphics much. (Yay for staring at my tea cup while I'm typing rather than the screen.)
I did get an adorable screenshot of an instance; I did a repair afterwards, and the game resumed being playable.
Mostly... I posted because the EA customer service folks had nothing, and... I don't think the person even believed me that it was crashing like it is, and that I'm the only person to have experienced crashes like this. (Admittedly, that annoyed me... because one of my friends has been experiencing crashes, too. But hers was the previous patch, mine is the new patch. Almost same exact symptoms, too.)
