Civ 3 is the only game I've had severe problems with in at least five years. Every time I hear anything from either Infogrames or Firaxis, they make it sound like it's your fault if you can't get it to run right (or can't get it to run at all, as the case may be.) Never mind the fact that every other game is working fine on the exact same system. Or that something that worked with the original version out of the box doesn't work anymore once the patch is installed. No, it's got nothing to do with the patch, it's obviously your hardware and your drivers. (I finally got a response to my request for the non-safedisc exe file, and they said they wouldn't send it until all other possibilities were exhausted. Hey, better than nothing, but it's silly how they want you to jump through all these hoops before they'll send you the file when the fact that the game ran before the patch should make it obvious that it's the patch and not your computer that's messed up.)
I would have said "forget it" and got a refund by now if that were possible. But, as usual with PC games, it's not, so I'll just hold out and hope the next patch puts things right while I see if I can get a legally cracked version of the exe file. Still, I can't believe that there are so many other would-be players out there who are having even worse problems than I am. In any other industry, this would have constituted a public-relations disaster. But gamers have learned the hard way that there's a certain amount of risk involved in buying PC titles, which is probably part of the reason why PC games are losing so much ground to consoles. I'm sure it's by pure luck alone that Civ 3 is the only game in recent history that will not cooperate on my current system, I know that many are not nearly so fortunate. Mindless as most console games are, you never have problems with hardware conflicts, bugs, or paranoid copy protection that stops legitimate buyers from playing what they paid money for.