my game no longer saves or loads...

So the game is essentially unplayable on most of current average systems, that's not exactly a stellar result for a platform that prides itself on making good old games playable again. I always thought the whole purpose of GOG was to make games run on modern systems, but maybe I should manage my expectations. Beign a paying customer only gets you so far these days it seems.

GOG doesn't do shit with the majority of the games they sell, since they don't have permission to edit most of them in any way other than to remove DRM. The common misconception that GOG goes through every game and fiddles with every bug needs to die out already.

Yeah, silly me to think there would be any added value to 10+ year old games being sold for $20.

Complain to Petroglyph. They never had good developers anyway.

I don't want to beat this to death, but Petroglyph never released the game as working under Windows 7, 8 or 10, GOG did. It clearly says so on the tin. To be fair, FoC works fine, so they got it half right.

I wonder though what is the main difference between the two, I always thought FoC was just an expansion pack tack-on, but something more substantial must have been altered, since that one does not seem to have the performance issues of the original.

You clearly don't understand who owns the game code then.

OK, so I had another go at it and it seems to work well enough now, to the point that the game is playable - graphics is fine, you do get however a bit of a sound stutter every time the game loads anything. Not terribly annoying, a small price to pay to be able to play I'd say.

After multiple trial and error attempts I settled at setting the compatibility mode to Win98/ME, admin rights on and most importantly Disable full screen optimisations checked! Without this option checked the game will minimise and switch to desktop at every screen change.

As a side note, and I am sure this has been discussed here many times before, the changing of compatibility mode to Win98 makes the game change the default savegame folder for whatever reason form C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Petroglyph\Empire At War\Save to C:\ProgramData\Petroglyph\Empire At War\Save. For me however, copying the old savegame files to the new fodler did not do the trick - they show up in the load game list but the game crashed every time I tried to open one of them. Any new savegames work fine though. Hence I suggest sorting the compatibility thing BEFORE delving into a campaign.

Hope this helps someone who may need it.