Using the latest installer 2.3.05 the game screen fails to appear. I can see the program listed in Task Manager but there is no CPU activity for it.

I also found that it creates a dmp file in "%LocalAppData%\Temp\Sins Dump" however this file is 0 KB in size.

The game just got a new patch 1.85 - maybe that patch resolves that.

1.85 produces same behavior. On a hunch I turned off my firewall which allowed the game to start.

I find it rather frustrating that a game requests access to the internet that shouldn't require it to play offline. Then fails to run at all when blocked. This is something I expected from Steam but lately it seems to be happening more frequently on GOG.

I routinely run Rebellion 1.83 without a working Internet connection and have not observed any problems. I have not patched yet, since there are reports that games in-progress on 1.83 cannot be resumed using a newer version. Which version(s) of Rebellion have failed in this way for you? To what address(es) were they attempting to connect? What firewall did you disable?

[Edit: v1.83 runs fine. Later versions are completely broken. If you are in the refund period, contact GOG support. They need to either get a non-crashing version published or get started on processing a refund. See full details in my later post.]

Under wine it eventually starts even if it can't connect. It tries to lookup the domain name galaxy-log.gog.com. It shouldn't be doing that if you aren't using galaxy.

The game starts faster if galaxy-log.gog.com gets an nxdomain respose rather than having to wait for a timeout when just blocking traffic.

You have you tried to REJECT the outbound traffic rather than DROP it?
Another workaround might be to run it in a separate namespace with only localhost available (if needed), e.g.:

No. I told my dns iterative resolver to look at a local dns server for questions about galaxy-log.gog.com and had that server say that the domain does not exist. This results in a lookup failure happening very quickly and sins doesn't sit around waiting for a network connection to time out.
Having your firewall send back an icmp packet indicating the connection was rejected, might also work well, but I haven't tried it.

Confirmed; Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 is broken far worse than 1.83 was. I installed a clean Sins of a Solar Empire 1.84, tried to start it, and it failed. On startup, Sins of a Solar Empire 1.84 hangs with no windows visible. This occurs on the system where I normally play.

I installed Sins of a Solar Empire 1.83 on a clean system with no network connection, which has never before run anything from GOG: no GOG Galaxy, no Sins of any version. I started it once to confirm it was a good install. I did not change any options. I exited Sins, patched to 1.84, and tried again to start it. It crashed immediately and wrote a minidump. I then patched to Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 and tried again to start it. It crashed immediately and wrote a minidump.

If the system has network connectivity, then Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 hangs on startup, similar to the problem reported higher in the thread. Affirmatively rejecting DNS traffic causes Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 to get past the DNS hang and instead causes it to black the screen, then crash and write a minidump. I did not try 1.84 with DNS blocked. I unblocked DNS, waited out the long stall, and eventually Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 abandons the DNS lookup, blacks the screen, and crashes. Thus, there is no way at all to run Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85, regardless of patience for the DNS lookup. As an aside, why is a DNS lookup being done in the GUI thread? Blocking operations in the GUI thread have been deprecated for more than a decade.

For Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85, one observed crash context was:

Register dump:
CS:0023 SS:002b DS:002b ES:002b FS:0063 GS:006b
EIP:00437e26 ESP:0032fc64 EBP:0032fccc EFLAGS:00010246( R- -- I Z- -P- )
EAX:00000000 EBX:00000000 ECX:00805a54 EDX:00000000
ESI:00806000 EDI:007a8ac0

Backtrace:
=>0 0x00437e26
1 0x00405c8a
2 0x0068d9bc

Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 is wholly unusable for me because it always crashes at startup, before it reaches the main menu. As noted above, this applies even on a system which had never before run anything from GOG. There cannot be any stale files confusing it. The only thing I can get out of it is that it tries to send two syslog messages to galaxy-log.gog.com stating that it failed to start the Galaxy service:

galaxy: ERROR [GalaxyServiceController] Failed to start Galaxy service: no service detected

This is correct, since GOG Galaxy has never been installed on that system. I have no use for GOG Galaxy. GOG Galaxy is extensively documented as being optional, so I see no reason why installing it should matter.

I cannot tell whether Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 crashes because Sins of a Solar Empire 1.85 requires GOG Galaxy or if the crash is wholly unrelated to the failure to start Galaxy. I can tell that this is not a regression in 1.85. Rather, it is a regression in 1.84. Sins 1.83 runs well and has been stable for several months. All later versions crash before reaching the main menu. I see in the GOG Changelog for Sins 1.84 a line item "Added various GOG Galaxy integration features." I suspect that the code for this line item is responsible for the crash by virtue of assuming that GOG Galaxy will be available. Unfortunately, this can only be proved by installing GOG Galaxy and observing that the crash stops. On a whim, I installed GOG Galaxy on the network-free system. It installed correctly, but failed to start. Therefore, even if running GOG Galaxy was a workaround for this crash, it is a workaround that I cannot use.

I could open a support ticket, but I'm not in the mood for another month of them telling me to try bogus and irrelevant things when 1.83 works fine, aside from it not being available for download by new purchasers. I wanted to get some friends to buy it here, but if they cannot get 1.83, and I cannot run post-1.83, there's no point in having them buy it at all. It would be really nice if GOG would keep old versions available until the new version is reliable. Past experience with GOG support has been that they provide the same level of assistance as level 1 Customer Service Representatives at call centers. Their objective is to get rid of the problem by making changes that seem to have solved other problems, with the hope that this problem might be like that one. In this case, when the problem is a regression in the game, it seems extremely unlikely that any of their canned solutions will have the slightest impact.

Fortunately for me, but not for any of the people with whom I wanted to play, I at least still have the old installer. They have no reason to buy, since they cannot get a working installer.

That's somewhat ignorant. Do you have an outdated Galaxy install? That's known to cause crashing with the newer Galaxy.dll files. Older versions of Galaxy will also leave leftover files on uninstall which will also cause crashing. Guess who could tell you how to manually remove Galaxy files & reg entries, Support. Personally I despise clients and have never installed Galaxy. If they can't help Support would likely offer you store credit if not a refund if you are so inclined. Particularly as your problem seems Galaxy related.
You are allowing localhost connections from the game, yes?

I have never had Galaxy installed on that system. I am not aware of any reason that any version of Galaxy ought to cause a crash. That is plain sloppy programming.

I still have a 1.83 installer, so I will be staying on that. As I said, my issue is that I cannot get my friends to play, because none of them have purchased *yet*, and because GOG does not offer the 1.83 installer as a download, none of them would be able to get the one version that can play with me. Hence, no point in getting them to buy.

I allowed all connections over localhost, yes.

Last time I tried to get support to deal with a simple website problem (failure to redeem a code), they spent a month trying to convince me the problem was with my browser. So, I view them as front line CSRs, with all the expectation of disappointment that entails. Thank you for starting a post with an insult though.

Hi,

I updated my game with patch 1.86 released by GOG (exe version 2.4.0.8), but when I open the game, the main menu screen still shows the game version is 1.85.

Please take a look into it. Many thanks

Yes, the mini dump claims to be 1.85 not 1.86, the only solution to solve this is DO NOT update your game with the 1.86 patch. Reinstall the whole game with 1.86 version updated by GOG.