Civ 3 color scrambling and res offset

So I recently (couple hours ago) bought C3C on Steam. When I go to launch it, all the colors of the game (menus, everything) are scrambled and changed to bright green, neon pink, and various tannish colors. the resolution also seems to be smaller and off center, but it's hard to tell when the colors are so screwed up. I've tried running the application under pretty much every kind of compatibility mode, but nothing changes.

I've tried googling, but amazingly enough, I found absolutely nothing pertaining to my problem. I've tried looking here, but the same thing applies. I've tried going to 2K's support site, but it seems that they don't even support Civ 3 anymore. What the bloody hell is this, the twilight zone?! I cannot be the ONLY/FIRST user in history to experience this problem!

I'm running Windows 7 on a very decent laptop. I know it's not hardware. my drivers are all up to date. I've thought that maybe the game needs Directx9 installed instead of DX10, but that would be crazy given that i play other, much more modern games that need at least 10.

Hell, i've even tried taking a snapshot of the main menu so you can see what I'm talking about, but the menu in the saved image is displaying colors correctly!! What in the world is going on here?

Any input or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Hmm, that is an odd one. I was going to suggest taking a screenshot, but I see you've already tried that. That seems to suggest that it's some sort of display issue. Perhaps it has something to do with the gaming running in 1024x768 by default, and perhaps your monitor doesn't like 1024x768 very much.

You can tell the game to keep your native resolution by going into the install folder, and then the Conquests folder within there, and editing conquests.ini, adding the line KeepRes=1 at some point. This will tell the game to keep whatever resolution your monitor was in before you started the game. You might also try adding the line PlayIntro=1 to PlayIntro=0 (modifying that line if it is present - I don't know if it's there by default). That will set it to skip the intro movies, which also change the resolution, and might be throwing off your display.

I'm curious if it works as expected on an external monitor, if you have one to test.

Windows 7 does include DirectX9 (technically, a modification of it, but it's compatible), and even the oldest Windows 7 install should have new enough DirectX for Civ3.

Edit: This is a bit of a shot in the dark, but does it look somewhat like this?



That's what I get if I set my monitor to use YPbPr color mode instead of RGB. It does look rather bright green, neon pink, and tannish. I took the picture with my dumbphone since it would look normal in a screenshot as well.

As for why running Civ3 would cause your monitor to switch color modes, I don't know. But if that is what's happening, there probably is an option to change color modes somewhere in your monitor's settings (on the physical monitor itself).

Have Windows search for compatible OS setting. Seem to recall xp or millennium work fine. Check in properties.

I think it would be most likely a color profile issue, and I agree with Quintillus that KeepRes=1 suggestion would likely take care of it - even if it doesn't fix the problem I'd recommend it for regular play anyways.

Also my experience with compatibility mode XP on Windows 7 is that it makes the game lag really hard as the game gets bigger. I'll do more research about this, but at least for me, compatibility mode introduces more problems than it solves.

hey guys, thanks for replying. i was starting to lose all hope and im thinking that ive wasted a few bucks when i bought this game. here's my status thus far:

Quintillus: I've added both of those lines to the settings, but the only change was the resolution. the colors are still screwed up. Also, keep in mind that I'm on a laptop, so no external monitor.

Moosezilla: I've tried literally every kind of mode I could select. absolutely no change.

I've taken pics of my screen with my phone. It's not as much tan as the images depict, but i was being literal when i said "color scrambling".

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That doesn't look normal, particularly the right side of the screen. The colors are kind of like it's a different color mode, but even so, the right side of the screen makes it look like graphics corruption of some kind. And since it's an internal-to-the-laptop monitor, there probably isn't a way to set the color mode.

The other thought that comes to mind is that I think Civ3 uses 16-bit color (I can check this tomorrow). I know that when I had Vista, it always reset to the Vista Basic color scheme when I ran Civ3, and I think that was why. I wonder if your graphics card or display has a bug where it can't handle 16-bit color correctly? Even if it does, though, it might be a manufacturing flaw, with that sort of scrambling on the right. What model of laptop (preferably with CPU and GPU) do you have, on the chance that there are known issues that might come up with a web search?

I agree with your assessment that things seem a bit off center. Which is odd, as even without KeepRes=1, they should be centered. In the screenshot of Rome, there shouldn't be anything much to the right of the Warrior and the big X in the upper-right of the city screen. This is certainly one of the stranger issues I've seen.

I am on a Macbook Pro running Win7.
CPU: intel i7 @ 2.3GHz
GPU: Geforce GT 650M

Since you had mentioned 16-bit coloring, I ran an experiment with my nvidia settings. I switched the color mode to 16-bit, and whaddyaknow, my desktop became contorted into the same garbled colors as in Civ3. A strong correlation.