Civilization II Complete Steam problem

EDIT: Sry, mistyped thread caption, it is of course civ 3 not civ 2.

Hello,
i have bought civilization III Complete via Steam and when i try to launch it, it crashes. Installation was without any problems.

I am running Windows vista x64 Business SP1.
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
4GB Ram

I get no error message, just "Program stopped to work, do you want to terminate or debug?".
When i click to debug, Microsoft Visual Studio is launched and it reveals, that exception was probably
Unhandled exception at 0x005cdbe6 in Civ3Conquests.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000b9c.

Do you have any ideas? Thank you.

Welcome to the forums Bobisek!

Well, I don't know what those error messages are, but I can tell you that older games (and Civ3 is from 2001 which is old in relative terms) don't run well on 64-bit systems. It has something to do with the memory addressing, and Civ3 was built specifically for 32-bit systems when 64-bit only OS'es weren't around. I remember that someone else was running Civ3 on a 64-bit system with errors and they had problems, here. They got around it by setting Civ3 to run under Windows XP SP2 compatability mode. Try doing that. If it doesn't work, then maybe someone knows how to read the error log you have.

Thank you. I heard something about running in xp compatibility and running as an administrator, but i am not sure how that works under Steam.

Also, it appears that this is not a case of famous font problem, because it appears there is no lsans.fot file in game directory, instead there is actual font file lsans.ttf

Steam keeps everything nicely seperated in folders. The folder for Civ3 should be found in (where ever you put it)\Steam\SteamApps\common\ . In the Civ3 folder should be the .exe that runs even when you are running it from Steam. Right clicking on that will let you change the compatability, and it should remain in effect even when you are running it through Steam.

Tried that, but it has no effect. Someone wrote that modifiing conquests ini file could help. Or are there any other possibilities? I bought game today and have no other OS than vista64, is there really no way to get it work?

It appears that before game crashes, .INI file is created:

[Conquests]
Voice Quality=0

Nothing else is inside.

I'm not too sure what you could modify in the .ini files that would help. Most likely, running the 32-bit game through Steam on a 64-bit Business OS probably all compounds together to give you hell. Bad software combination for gaming I would say, but you have a nice hardware setup. I would get my hands on Vista Ultimate, I run my laptop and desktop on 32-bit Ultimate and all of my games work fine, either by themselves or through Steam.