I was hoping Settlers III and IV would be worth getting if they ran on my current system (Windows 8.1) and fixed the longstanding crash bugs of the original (such as when the one with ships).

My experience not being able to even load S4 has me revising this expectation. Does anyone know if they fixed those flaws or not?

I am working on making a VMWare image for Windows 7 (or perhaps even Windows XP) to play the game in. Hopefully that will at least help the run issues.

The game would crash fairly reliably (unfortunately) when running ships. I forget the exact problem since it has been so long, but it was very infuriating and almost ruined some scenarios.

I think I managed to barely avoid it a couple of times, but it was not good. They never did fix it.

Exception 0xc0000005 at 0x18c0bbd3. Oldest mention I've found is from 2002. To me, it's been happening since the beginning, with completely different computers (both hardware and software). It most commonly happens when there are ships in the level, but it's not limited to that. Over the years I've found that limiting the use of ships helps a little. So instead of planning massive Operation Overlord, I made as few trips as possible and managed to get through problematic levels. But it's no fun.

As far as I know, there's no fix for that. It definitely happens with GOG version. But clearly not to everyone. It must depend on something, some configuration option perhaps. But I've tried everything and nothing helps.

I pretty much lost all hope already, but few days ago I noticed this:

www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/the-settlers-history-collection

It's supposed to be updated versions of all old Settlers games with official support for higher resolution, etc. Clearly, that must involve bigger changes than no-CD crack used for GOG version. So we can only hope that they also fixed bugs like this in the process.