Game not starting, editor is?

So I'm trying to run Civ III from a CD on my windows 7 pro laptop. I ran the setup.exe in compatibility mode for XP, clicked run as a administrator, the game installed, put the Civilization3.exe file in compatibility mode, ran Civ III, and...... nothing happened. a window didn't even open. So I ran civ3Edit.exe, and that worked fine. What's the issue? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Chickenface said:

So I'm trying to run Civ III from a CD on my windows 7 pro laptop. I ran the setup.exe in compatibility mode for XP, clicked run as a administrator, the game installed, put the Civilization3.exe file in compatibility mode, ran Civ III, and...... nothing happened. a window didn't even open. So I ran civ3Edit.exe, and that worked fine. What's the issue? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

Possibly you are running up against the problem described in this thread?

Short version: the civilization3.exe file associated with many CD-based installations (but not all of them) was/is copy-protected using the secdrv.sys driver, which was disabled by a security update to all post-XP Windows-versions in September last year. Although the update is non-discretionary in Win10, it can be uninstalled in Vista to Win8.1 (not recommended).

The linked thread has more details about this, including several (other) possible fixes. With any luck, one of them will work for you.