NEED HELP Game Crashes every time

Every time I play the game, when I start new game the map selection screen comes up. But once I press the the circle at the bottom, I get a message saying "Civilization3 has caused an erroe in CIV3.exe" If someone fixed this problem, please post.

Have you made any changes to the rules?

What do you mean by changes?

Originally posted by citybug711
What do you mean by changes?

Click to expand...

Done anything at all to the Civs in that game, the Map size you play on, or to the Setler, Worker or Scout.

Have you used the Editor to change any of the default settings for the .bic file? This seems to cause my games to crash. Especially changing civ colors.

I'm having the same trouble as Citybug711. I have never been able to run Civ3. The intro movie runs fine, but the primary screen (New Game, etc.) looks funny: there are what looks like multiple lines of text overlaying each other (rendering them all unreadable) near the botom, and the buttons and their text descriptions seem misaligned. If I choose New Game, it takes me to the options screen (land mass, etc.), where once again all the text seems misaligned. Clicking the circle to start the game causes the oh-so-tautological error message ("Civilization 3 has caused and error in civilization3.exe").

I'm way over-spec on requirements (1 GHz AMD CPU, 256 MB RAM) and my drivers are up to date. I'm patched to 1.16f. I do have several pieces of hardware noted (negatively) in other posts, though: VIA 133 chipset, SB Live. I'm running Windows ME.

This is the first game I've ever had any trouble with, and I review games (so I play a LOT of them). A dubious distinction for Civ3, to be sure.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

After digging for some time in the Infogrames help FAQ, I discovered an entry that mentioned text displaying oddly if you have more than 255 fonts installed on your machine. It doesn't mention the crashing, but I checked and I had over 900 (!) fonts installed. So, I painstakingly weeded them down to 250, and now the game works. So, Citybug, I suspect this may be your problem, too.

i am quite new to civIII and i dont know why my game keeps crashen it usually crashes either at the start when i choose my character but usually it crashes after i get to get into it which really gets me
Does anyone else have problem it just say this program has performed a illegal operation BLA BLA BLA there is no reason for it crashen it just does.
I have reinstalled it but it doesnt seem to work.
The weird thing is my brothers game never crashes and he is in 2010.
If anyone can help plz respnd asap as i wanna play a game now ITS SOOOOOOO GOOD

what's happening here is that civ iii is writing to the windows registry. This is not only bad, but totally unacceptable for a game that is actually being sold. Why it happens, and how it to stop it?
Damned if I know. However, after installing a graphics card containing a nvidia chip (and increasing RAM to 512k) it stopped happening on my system. This, BTW, is a well documented "bug". Bug is in quotes because this problem is much more profound than a simple bug. I've stopped playing this game until it is properly patched (and yes I have ver 1.16), CIV III is the buggiest piece of crap I have ever encountered, and I refuse to be an uncompensated beta-tester. Frankly, I'm not convinced the game is salvageable as a commercial product in its' current form. Those who have had acceptable performance from this game are just lucky. My current beef with the game is the long waits between turns(5 minutes or longer), and I currently have a very powerful machine.
I check back here from time to time looking for the second patch.