GCIII won't start game, windows 10

Sorry to hear you are having trouble.

It would help if we could see what's in your debug.err file, it is located in \Documents\My Games\GC3 or \Documents\My Games\GC3Crusade

If you would upload it to a cloud service (DropBox, Google Drive, One Drive) and post a link here, the developers can take a look at it.

Thank you for your patience and patronage.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q5adj6his59mgld/debug.err?dl=0

Link to debugerr file

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are having trouble.

You have a ton of GPU error messages in that file. 

When was the last time you updated your drivers for it?  Seems you are using:

  Debug Message: Description: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630

So this would get you to an update path:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

Houston, We have lift off.

I followed the Intell link        https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html            to update drivers. It scanned my system and they recommended four updates. I updated all but the graphics driver because Intel suggested I use the manufacturer's updates because Intel may remove their "customizations". 

I went to the Manufacturer's web site (Lenova) they scaned my computer , and installed their updates. They didn't specify what they were updating.

After my computer restarted, I tried to start Galactic Civilizations III and play a game.  It started up as usual stopping at "Setting up players", I waited ten minutes, nothing happened except the audio kept playing, but the "Spiral Galaxy" in the center of the screen stopped spinning. 

I checked in Windows settings and checked device manager, to see if my graphics card had been updated, but it said I had the latest driver update and I saw where the update was two years old. 

I than went back to intel, and despite their warnings, I downloaded their latest graphics driver update, and now device manager says I have a 10/17/2021 driver update installed.

I went back to start up Galactic Civilizations, and after about 30 seconds after clicking start, the game is running. I repeated this four times and even changed the map size to huge, with no problems. 

Also I haven't seen any changes in my graphics that Lenova may have customized.

I thank you very much, for your time, and help. 

Over and out.

Excellent, pleased to hear it.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

I'm afraid I got ahead of myself., I did download the new drivers from Intel, and the game did work, but my other programs were a mess. Microsoft programs, Excell, Access, etc. had many problems with slow graphics. When I clicked commands, they paused before they did anything, other programs and games also were having problems. The new driver helped GCIII, but messed up my other programs.

I couldn't remove the new drivers without help from Intel support. After about two hours of work, we finally got my computer back to the way it was with the old drivers, which were "Lenova's" latest drivers, which means everything is working except Galactic Civilizations III. Back to square one.

Because it's a clear driver issue, there is not a lot we can do.  

You can try running the game windowed to see if that helps:

Go to:

\Documents\My Games\GalCiv3

Open Prefs.ini in notepad

Change:

Fullscreen=1
DisplayResolution=-1 x -1

to:

Fullscreen=0
DisplayResolution=1024 x 768

Now that res will make it really small but you can change it to whatever you like if it works to run the game.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager