My wife and I love playing Civ 3 conquests together. Both of us have legal versions of the software and neither of us has problems when playing single player. Note that these problems occur after the game has been initiated and started. Sometimes the problems occur after 40 turns, sometiems they happen turn after turn. We are, of course, running the latest patch level on the game.

However, often when we play we will experience one or more of the following problems:

1) The game will inexplicably crash for no reason. No warnings are given. (Are there logs to help deduce what's going on?)

2) More frequently, if one of us is doing any sort of city maintenance or in any window OTHER than that of the main world map, when the start of the next year comes around, whoever's turn is FIRST will often run into a situation where the game will simply hang.

We have deduced that, often times, the dialog box notifying the first player of that year that it is his/her turn is actually somehow hidden behind whatever window in game we're currently using, which will effectively prevent us from clicking it (as you will notice in regular games, when the dialog is up, you MUST click to close it before doing anything else.)

3) Resyncs occur frequently (which is strange since we're both interconnected on a very expensive and very very fast switch. I'm into computer networks, so I have access to this kind of stuff. Likewise, both of our computers are reasonable fast Athlons 1.6 GHz and above)


So, has anyone else experienced anything like that and can comment? The usual suggest such as "reinstall" will not be helpful, as we are both playing on solid machines with fresh copies of the software.