Never had any problems with crashes and other bugs myself.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. About the game being complicated; I would actually say that one of my few complaints about the game is that it isn't complicated enough! I think that some of the armies play fairly similarly to one or another or at least that a few have crazily small army lists *looks at the Minotaurs* but really that is quite forgivable when you look at the monstrous number of armies that are available for play. On the stability side of things I've been playing for quite some time now and it's never once crashed on me. It's a shame you're having so many problems running it.

Battlecry III ran great for me.. Running windows7 finished the game and it never crashed once.

I have not played a caster yet… was thinking of playing one on my second round.

I completely understand the frustration of a system crashing when I'm trying to play a game. But like a said.. ran great for me..

I'm running..

Windows 7
EVGA P55 SLI 132-LF-E655-KR LGA1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor
With a old GeForce 8800GTS 512MB Video Card.

Vista x64 - works nicely. Not crash free, but nowhere near incessant. For me with a GOG I consider a crash every 5 or so hours of play to be fair game. This easily met that.

Spellcasting is a little bit rough around the edges, certainly if you tried for one of the battlemage style things like fire. Remember that the pause is just about active, so you can pause, select spell, cast, run (I think you may have to release pause to run away as otherwise you'll cancel your cast order).

Mage variants I found worked well were a night elf fighter with healing magic, or a demon summoner (haven't tried this on WBC 3, but on 2 you could summon succubis, who then left souls of their victims, that allowed you to restore your mana, and summon more.

I found the fighter classes much more playable, and I'm normally a mage heavy player.

Thx guys, might pick a bigger sword and come back to this one.

I would still contest the notion that this was one of the "greatest" RTS of all time, but it sure can be loads of fun and has a few very cool features, when running smoothly.

As for "incessant" crashes, two different releases crashed on me (on 2 different, up-to-date machines) as often as every 5 minutes, and I positively never got more than 20 minutes of continuous gameplay out of them. If GOG managed to fix this and extend the crashless period to even 3 hours, my hat is off to them.

You mean you aren't reviewing the GOG version of the game?

They do a lot of work. It's the ethos of the site to support the platforms they say, and include patches (and perhaps unofficial ones - I don't know), but they get it working. It works for me. Buy via GOG.

I'm running on win 7 64 bit without any problems, even had a few multiplayer matches the other day :D

Now the resolution... that's a different story all together lol.

on pre win 7 never crashed and very enjoyable
i prefer to warcraft - like heroes - sick of destroying forests