If you went a little higher in my post, you'll notice I also said some games will patch and some won't.  I didn't elaborate any further because I didn't have the knowledge of the game version numbers, which you do and provided.

But the OP doesn't have an original game, they have a pirated downloaded version, not just a cracked .exe/.dll file to make the game run without the disc.  If they can source an original .exe file, etc, then yes, they may be able to replace the cracked one and update properly.  If not, they will probably need to find and download the version of the game that will allow them to update.

At the end of the day, the OP's problem is/was they hadn't patched their game, and the most basic, simplest of searches would have revealed that to be their problem, which casts serious doubts (in my mind) on their claims to have spent so long searching, and done such an all exhaustive search.

It may be that the cracked .exe file used to negate the use of the DVD is being seen as invalid by the updater(Patch).  That's why it won't update.  Before I started using AM, I sourced a cracked .exe to run without inserting the disc all the time.  When it came time to patch, it wouldn't due to an "Invalid File Found", after replacing the cracked .exe with the original, it updated fine. 

It appears some cracked games will patch and some won't, it could well depend on how the .exe has been cracked to bypass the disc requirement.

Also, i doubt you spent all that time searching, as there are already dozens of threads and posts clearly telling you that AM will NOT work unless the game is patched.  If you really did search like you claim you would have already seen all of those instructions about patching your game to 1.3/1.4 to get the latest version of AM to work.

If you can't patch your game because it is an illegally downloaded pirated version, then your shit out of luck.

Try clicking on the button to buy rewards.  When you click there, the points will show correctly.  Sometimes, with some sims after buying rewards, it is slow to remove the points from the tab, but when you try to buy, they aren't there and you can't buy.  At least with my game anyway. 

I learnt to ignore it as another EAxis glitch that really doesn't affect my game.

I have seen the game take up nearly 6GB of the 12GB I have and push 2-3 of the 8 cores to 95-100% of usage.  I have long felt that because of this, many people would experience fairly severe problems when the game tried to grab resources that weren't available, or simply pushed thei available resources to the max.

I hate to think how bad the EP is going to make things.

Weren't there reports, or suggestions, that TS3 had memory leaks?

If so, that would explain why rebooting the computer helps.

Have you tried a new game to see if it works? 

Even try a new game with your CC removed and just with AM and IS.  I never used IS and decided not to when I read that they stopped development of it, because if no one took over development of IS, then eventually it would become really outdated and unusable anyway.  I waited and just us the AM story mode, works pretty good from what I have seen so far.

I don't agree, I often run the game over several hours (real time) without saving, and it saves fine when i do.  the longest i have gone without saving was about 8 hours playing.  When I finally saved to go to bed, it saved fine.  So I don't think the time between saving has anything to do with it.

I have only had 1 problem with saving, which threw an error 12.  I deleted the saved game, restored the back up, and haven't had any errors since.

I have only had one crash on saving, and that was after selecting quit, then telling the game to save before quitting, it crashed during the save.  Since then, I always save on it's own, then quit without saving, no problems since.

What else is new?  Kind of like the million and one posts asking about the expiry dates on AM, or why the latest AM version crashes their unpatched games, etc.