PTW errors and crashes

[slick_711]

Hello! Sorry to begin my forum membership with a tech question, but I can't figure it out. I've been a long time Civ fan (I, II, III), and had originally purchased III & later PTW when they first came out. Played them quite a bit, then life and work pushed them aside, changed computers, blah blah. So now I've found I have free time again, remembered the game, and wanted to play. I found my disc for PTW, but not Civ III. Oh well, I repurchased it online, no big deal. Get that installed, it works great. Install PTW, not so much. I have reinstalled both entirely, and re-re-installed PTW, and it still gives me issues.

Civ III is v.1.29f, PTW doesn't work @ v.1.07 as the disc installs it, or @v.1.27f if I patch it. The issues it's giving me are graphic glitches, buttons don't look correct in the 'start game' process, ignoring that, once I start a new game it pops up the "Your civilization... blah blah..." menu, but the colors are all wrong, that text box is pink, and the other screen graphics are messed up. Before can do anything the game gives me a fatal error and crashes.

I'll just play Civ3 for now, but I vaguely remember from years ago that PTW was a bit more fun, more Civs (I'm a fan of the Celts & Scandinavians hahaha), etc. And I thought, shoot, I should just buy Civ IV, but that looks too detailed, I think I prefer the play style of 3 & PTW.

I'm fairly computer literate, but no software programmer/expert. Is this a known issue or something anyone is familiar with? Any assistance is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

[Macezek]

Welcome to CFC slick!

This is actually a pretty well known issue. Lots of people have reported it, and there are few if any solutions or even responses to the error. It could be that there is a disk error during installation that ghosts its way through to install files improperly, you can try installing from another PTW disk, or exchange at a store if possible (I heard BestBuy was having issues with their copies). Have you tried installing Conquests to see if that installation with PTW has the same error? Search through the tech support forum for other threads with the same error, some of them talk about doing a manual uninstall along with a registry cleanup before trying to reinstall it. I would try doing that just to make sure everything is installed properly.

What operating system are you running, and which service pack? If Vista, is your User Account Control enabled? And what directory did you install the game to? Are you running the game from an Administrator account or a User account? Also, what kind of video card do you have and how much RAM?

If I were you, I would have just spent some extra few dollars and purchased Civ3 Complete, which contains the game and all the expansions fully patched up in one single install.