Why do they include scenarios on the PTW CD which cannot be played because the .flcs files are missing? I was trying the ancient Med scenario, colud not pay the Persians, game crashed.
So I tried Carthage, game crashed as soon as I tried talk to the Pheonicians.

After going back through the last 4 pages, I see I'm not the first to encounter problems with this (Ancient world) scenario. Does anyone know if the required .flc files can be downloaded or have a list of which are the "safe" civilzations to play?

Many of these scenarios were included on the PTW CD to otherwise fill out a fairly hollow product offering. The scenarios fopr the most part were downloaded based on the limited recommendations of a very narrow segment of the player population that may have been partially involved in the very limited Beta testing effort that was conducted in the summer of 2002.

Many of the scenarios developed by players contain material that is a direct copyright infringement of unit animations, graphics, or text material. While players may freely incorporate these types of things in their games for their own enjoyment, redistribution of the material creates all sort of legal nightmares for publisher of the CD who would have to be prepared to pay a percentage of all revenues to each and every copyrightholder for all the graphics and images. Basically the semi-stolen image content created all sorts of barriers to success.

A second aspect of the problem was that the PTW executable program made a number of incompatible changes with the position and function of key files in the software. Virtually every scenario or game file with even the smallest change to one line of content ended up being incompatible with the transition from Civ3 as a standalone product to then running smoothly on the PTW version of the game.

The result was scenario file distribution on the PTW CD that had very few fully functional or coherently tested game files.

Most of the Scenario Makers are just fans of the game like you and I, and these fans have manually gone back into their scenarios to correct the software and text file mismatches and glitches so that you can download the revised versions even though the versions contained on the PTW disk will for the most part never end up functioning on their own.

If you have read those older threads, then you know the problem was copyright "violations" by the mod-makers. You can get away with a lot in your own private mod, even if you offer it for free download at various sites. But Atari could not have legally put all that on a disc it was selling. So many of the scenarios were "gutted".

You should be able to find all (or nearly all) of the scenarios, in updated versions, here in the Creation & customization forum, at Apolyton, and at CDG. Searching these sites should provide you with current versions of pretty much everything you want to play. :)

I did my own investigation and found that the following civs
can be used. When starting the scenaio, pick one of the following
for your self and select some or all of the others for the AI. Do not
use any random civs:

Rome
Maced. Greeks
Huns
Hittites
Carthage
Babylon
Egypt

I am in the proccess of fixing the scenario with the editor, got most of them playable, the German tribes leader looks a lot like
Bismark, but it's better than crashing.
Why the people a Firaxis couldn't take a few hours to fix this
is beyond me. I suppose that's why I was able to buy PTW on
sale for a mere $24.95 in Canadian dollars.