Problems and what I did about them

[Marzipan]

Overall, my Civ III has been working great (with the patch). I haven't seen any of the slowdown problems some people have been mentioning here. I have a P3 1G system with a GeForce 3 Ti200. I installed a new CD ROM drive just before I installed the game, and that caused some other problems that I had to fix, so at first I didn't know if the game issues were left over from that headache, but I can see from this thread that they are problems other people have had. Here are some problems I have encountered and what I did about them:

First thing I noticed was the way the screen size wouldn't get put back where it belonged. Silly me, I should have read the read file more closely, it is covered in there, and also I noticed someone posted the solution on here (the couple of lines to add to the civilization3.inf file). That worked.

Sometimes the game would end and go back to my desktop instead of playing the intro. It was suggested on here that that problem may be a video card driver issue. I didn't want to see the intro anyway, so I renamed it intro_disable.bic, now it doesn't play anyway. More on this issue in a minute.

Another issue, the one that brought me to the technical support thread, was that my latest game would crash instead of letting me enter the industrial age. I was wupping the AI's butt (on chieftan level); maybe this is a hidden AI strategy if you get too far ahead hehe. I was using Detonater 21.83 at the, so I switched to 12.41, thinking I might be running into some of the NVIDIA issues others have talked about here. 12.41 did not solve the can't-enter-the-industrial-age issue. I also tried not loading second party stuff, and that didn't help either. Since those didn't fix my problems, I went back to the latest version of Detonator (22.80 I think) and changed the load second party thing back to what it originally was. Ultimately I decided to reinstall the game, and THAT worked! I was able to progress past the industrial age and am now in the modern age.

Everything now seems to be running just peachy, and I am using Detonator 22.80 and have the load second party thing back to what it normally is.

Based on this experience, here is my advice to anyone having a problem:

First, install the latest patch (duh!)

Second, read the read me file carefully, and set the inf tweak as they suggest.

Third, since you prolly don't want to see the intro every dang time you start up the game, rename it to intro_disable.bic (it's in ../art/movies).

Fourth, if you are having any other mysterious problems, reinstall the game, and maybe completely delete everything and start from scratch. I think the install do-dah has a problem, but eventually it seems to get everything in.