Alright I still have no idea what causes this problem or pinpointed the way to fix it, but if you follow the steps below hopefully we can get it going.
1) Uninstall Civ 2 (backing up any save games you may want.)
2) Reinstall Civ 2 into a different directoyry. (Ie: If Civ 2 was installed in C:\MPS\Civ2\ then try installing it into C:\Games\MPS\Civ2\ or whatever variant you wish.)
3) Reinstall WinG. (Should be on your Civ 2 CD)
4) Download and install the official 2.42 patch, do this even if your copy says 2.42. (Or if you have the ToT version, the 1.1 official patch.)
5)Go to
www.Ligos.com and download the latest Indeo drivers and codecs.
6) Install the latest Indeo drivers and codecs.
7) Make sure your version of Civ 2 is still running no problem, and turn off animated heralds.
8) Upgrade your version of Civ2 with my Patch (either the .ace files
or the .exe) by either running the exe and giving it Civ2's root directory (Ie: C:\games\MPS\Civ2) or by extracting it to Civ2's root directory.
Hopefully this worked, it is necessary to have a Civ2 CD (2.42, CiC, FW, MGE and/or ToT) to use the MGE Patch.
If it didn't are you installing the game: on a Windows based PC, in English, with full options not just minimum required files, have you gotten the latest upgrades for Windows from
www.Microsoft.com?
If yes to all of this and it still doesn't work, well Civ 3 comes out soon, though there's no MP in that either. I do have some copies of CivNet to sell if you're desperate
