My friend is running Civ3 and Conquests (not PTW like I thought before) and I'm running Civ3 Gold.

I start the PBEM game, he can load it fine, but when it comes back to me I get "Could not open scenario file. The file may be corrupt!" and then "DataIO operation System Error: GAME"
"Error Reading File xxxxx.SAV" (where those x's are just the name of the game).

Tried loading it through multiplayer anhd I got an addictional error, "DataIO operation System Error: CNSL"

He bought conquests specifically so we could play together and it's been almost a week, we can't get anything to work. Very frustrating. Any ideas?

Thanks to all

Civ3 Gold? I assume you're using PTW. If your friend is using Civ3 Conquests to play the PBEM game, then the two versions aren't going to be compatible. It's probably because C3C saved the game in the C3C format, rendering the save "corrupt" to PTW.

Civ 3 Gold, actually. It is a not-so-recent release with Civ3 and PTW combined.

Everywhere I've read says that as long as the PTW guys hosts there should be no problem. Our multiplayer games online seem to work fine. I guess PBEM is different. Can anyone else confirm that Conquests saves in a different format? Seems odd that they would do this.

They are in a similar format, but different section have extra information in them in conquests. I suggest that you both play it in PTW. :)