I installed the game today, then patched up to 1.16. Then I tried opening, to once again begin dominating the world.

I got the first screen, with a tower and Civ III shown. Screen leaves, and I prepare for the game to load and see that lovely intro movie.

Never happens. :mad: Not even an error message, it just doesn't load.

I'm following everything the trouble-shooting file says.
I checked out tech-support, is it possible I am experiencing the Safe-Disk problem. I already e-mailed them about this, but they seem to be rather sticky about sending out a copy. Fortunately, I live in the US.

Any other things I should be doing, or any other idea what could be causing a problem.

Using a Toshiba labtop 2060 CDS, 160 RAM, latest Direct X, etc, and have run games that I thought were more system intensive than this one would be.

I am having the exact same problem. If you haven't tried this yet, press ESC as soon as the white screen appears. If you can do this before the game locks up, you will be able to play.:D It seems that the movie is the only problem. I haven't found a permanent fix for the movie yet, though.

I will be on the lookout and let you know if I find anything to fix this. I would appreciate the same. Happy ruling!

Hi

You have no doubt solved this by now but if not this may be helpful.

I have spent hours trying to get civ.3 to run on a Dell Laptop despite it being well over the stated game specs in every respect. Tech-support said it was either the safe disk protection or the laptops refresh rate.

Anyhow (no thanks to tech-support) I have got it running by adding

Video Mode=1024
KeepRes=1

to the end of the civililization.ini file AND connecting to an external monitor (17").
Oddly it then runs perfectly on the laptop screen as well. Just got to work out how to get it to run when it is not connected to a monitor.

Well, the problem hasn't gone away, so dumb question time. Where do I find and open civilization.ini?

It should be in the civiliztion folder but no doubt you have loked there. I think it only gets written when you have run the game the first time, so if you have not been able to run it at all it may be absent.
I'll send you a copy of my ini file if you mail me rblarkins@aol.com, you can try that.