I've had this both on disk and on Steam. Issue with both is that they are pretty unstable in recent years with CTD's etc.

Have these problems been addressed in the GOG version? If so I'd be more than willing to buy it a third time if it meant I could actually sit down for a session without it crashing every X amount of game days.

I don't have the GoG version but I'm confident that it would run pretty good. The overall point of this site is to release old games that run well on modern operating systems. Every game I've ever bought from them has ran great. The thing with Steam is they don't guarantee that some of the old games they sell will run on modern operating systems. When you buy an old game on Steam, it's a gamble if it will work or not for you.

The base game sometimes takes long to load if you load a savegame. It also takes it's time when I quit the game until I get back on my desktop. On the main menu screen the game sometimes stutters. I think it has something to do with the background animation. I chose the highest graphics quality but this shouldn't be a problem for my PC. I also tried it with V-Sync enabled and off. No difference.

The expansion pack runs like a charm with the same settings.

Both games have the problem that sometimes the sandclock on the mousepointer spinns like crazy.
But all this doesn't effect the gameplay. Ingame I had no slowdowns, stuttering and so on.

Got the same issue on every copy of Empire at War i own (CD/DVD, Steam and now GoG),looks like its some sort of bug that was never fixed.
One thing that is very curious is the fact that it doesn't stutters every time i start EaW, it always stutters in man menu but not in-game.
I will try to find a solution or explanation (if there is any) tomorrow.

hm. i remember that bug from release date back then too but wrote it off as a borked release version and havent touched the game since. i somehow thought gogs release would be completely fixed.

a good hint with that it doesnt stutter every game start. and good luck on finding a solution! checkback would be greatly appreciated.

I wonder if the stuttering is due to the Gamespy shut down?

Full Spectrum Warrior had a similar problem, it was constantly trying to contact GS servers and ran like crap for it. Had to change a file to send it to localhost to fix it.

If you don't matter the Storymode and just want to conquer the universe you should play the expansion. As already said, despite the base game it runs like a charm, has one more faction with a different gameplay and new features like zooming in into a planet twice on the galaxy map. If you zoom in once you see the troops and buildings on the planet like in the base game. But if you zoom in one more time you can see the map layout of the battlefield and plan you tactics before entering the battle or even decide where on the map your buildings and troops are. This is not possible in the base game.

good thinking, thanks! didnt check my firewall yet and indeed i found some blocked requests. not that frequent, but who knows... ill see if i can come up with any correlation to the stuttering as soon as i have some time to play again.

--- well... i started off the game with the storymode and so far i would like to finish it.
but that feature does indeed sound good. even thought about something like that while playing yesterday :) guess ill start the expansion either when i finish the story or get too frustrated by the freezing ^^ thanks for the tip!

---

edit... no clue what it is with this program but the freezes keep happening for me. starting with stutters and becoming worse with about an hour before it isnt fun anymore and i need a restart.
so far i checked the firewall logs/traffic, cpu and ram usage. no problems that i can tell. no sudden spikes or loads. as far as i can tell it only tries to connect at startup. didnt try allowing it yet, but i dont think that would change anything. it hardly even uses the cpu or graphic card.
it may be some memory leak that becomes noticably worse over time... havent looked into that. yet it seems that they fixed it in the expansion however. so i guess i just give up and restart every hour ^^
if anyone finds a fix (so you can play the standard games storymode without the stutter/freeze bug forcing the restart) please let me know.

I've been running into some pretty serious framerate issues after about an hour of play. Any and all land battles reduce my framerate to a crawl and every time I destroy a building, the game freezes for a few seconds. I've been searching around for a fix, but I can't find one.

I'm using a AMD Phenom II x6 1090T and a GTX 760 with 8GB RAM, so it shouldn't have any trouble with running a game as old as Empire at War, yet it's so slow that it's almost unplayable.

Try running the program in compatibility mode for 98/ME. This worked for me. Thank you to the user "Puppysnuff" for suggesting it. You'll also need to relocate your saves. See here for info:
http://www.gog.com/forum/star_wars_empire_at_war_gold/possible_fix_game_stuttering_win_81_x64/post1

The problem for this solution, at least for me, is that it does not entirely fix the problem. I get audio stutter that seems to progressively get worse the more I play on. Better, but still really impacts my ability to get into playing the base game.

I've logged over 150 hrs on my steam version and have only suffered a few CTDs, at least some of which were due to a mod I had installed. Are you sure you're running it in the modes that work best?

I have had framerate drop with intense space battles featuring dozens of cap ships and literally hundreds of fighters on screen plus debris and space stations, and that's been across two different laptops. Running WIN 7 64-bit on the old one and 8.1 on this one, ctd's are extremely rare.

Switching compatibility to Win98 mode worked for me.