Galactic Civilizations 2 won't start

from Stardock Forums

Hi!

I recently installed GC2 again after not playing it for a while. Last time I played it was long ago back on my Win XP system. I have since formatted and installed Windows 7 (64 bit) and a completely new Impulse.

So I went on Impulse to install GC2 with both updates, DA and TotA. Installing it works fine and starting GC2 itself also works but as soon as I try to start either Dark Avatar or Twilight of the Arnor I only get a black screen with the GC themed mouse cursor. This black screen remains for about 3-4 seconds and after that I get a windows popup message telling me that "Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.". Same when trying to start TotA, it's only the original GC2 that will start up just fine.

Is this a known issue and is there any way to fix it? I tried uninstalling all of GC2 and re-installing it, that didn't fix anything (by the way, when uninstalling TotA Impulse will automatically reboot the computer WITHOUT ASKING FOR CONFIRMATION. This is some seriously crappy malware style behavior, please fix that!).

26,478 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Nothing?

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Come on. I can't be the only one having this problem, right? There is nothing special about my system, just a normal Win7 x64 installation with the latest Impulse.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Unfortunately, GALCIV and its variations won't run on Windows 7, 64-bit.

Funny thing though - I guess they felt it wasn't important to warn customers.

The game is addictive - I've had it running on a number of machines over the years.  I have paid for and played the expansions heavily.  One of the reasons I upgrades my hardware to a kick-ass system form Dell was so I could play  the game with all of the video elements running.

When it came time to reinstall, I had a hell of time recovering my password through impulse.  It took 4 tries, and an email to their offices.  INstalled Impulse, logged in and waited for it to install.

The nothing.  Tried everything, searched all of the boards, and unfortunately there's no solution to 64 bit Windows 7.

I have not given up on Stardock - I'm downloading sins right now as they claim it will run.  But I will miss my favourite game.

 

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Actually I found a solution:
Editing the prefs.ini to remove fullscreen mode worked.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

The above suggestion worked for me -- though turning the Fullscreen setting from 1 to 0 did not actually turn off full-screen it did get me into the main menu long enough to turn it off manually.  That being said the game hasn't exactly been stable for me in Win7 so if you've got an option go XP or Vista (the officially supported platforms.)

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

But, I see that my problem is slightly different from yours.  Unlike you, I can actually see the main menu and everything.  HOWEVER, the problem is that when I go to start a new game or I try to load one of my old game saves from my old computer, it crashes.