it took months for me to finish the game and yes it was worth it , some of the later challenges are the best you will ever find in such types of games, i was playing on windows 7 x64 , did not have any of said issues had a game crash on two long game sessions .
The difficulty increases based on how you play the starting parts , relationships with others , being a peace promoter will make the game a bit harder, i just built up a good army + god support and invaded and made anyone vassal if they were causing problems with threats.

Planning ahead to expand later helps out a lot, Remember the sooner you finish the objectives , the less strain on you

Planning to play pharaoh when i can afford to get that game as well

I never had any problems with the game, but I heard that, unfortunately, they are not uncommon.

I can, however, tell you that the game itself is definitely worth playing. Pharaoh is still my favorite, I like building epic monuments ;) Zeus is a bit too much simplified to my taste. There are just a few goods/services that you have to provide to let the tenants develop their houses to maximum level. It is far more challenging and requires more careful planning in Pharaoh. What I do like more in Zeus is that missions are held in the same city (sometimes there is a short break for creating a colony). In Pharaoh you start from scratches every time and sometimes you can abuse it - you only need ~100 more people in your city to reach mission objective? No problem, spam a few slums areas and it's done. You can do the same in Zeus but you'll have to deal with those slums in the very next mission so it's not a good idea!

I tested the game with various difficulty settings and I must admit it's well done. Choose easier settings if you just one to progress through the story. The game won't be trivial but you won't have to worry about major disasters. In normal settings you can expect more micromanaging - some buildings may collapse or catch fire (it's quite rare in easy mode). The difficult settings are quite unforgiving, a lot of bad things will happen and you will have to take your decisions carefully - start building a new part of a city too early without proper reserves and you may doom yourself. I wouldn't recommend the most difficult option because it's so hard it actually requires that you know what will happen soon. For example that after two years a monster will attack you city. You have to know which hero you will need and what are his requirements to join your cause. You just have to prepare everything before the attack so that you can call him immediately (you cannot do it before the monster appears!) Otherwise the monster will destroy most of your city and won't leave you any hope to rebuild it.

The issues dont impact everyone and in my case they just seem to go away. The sound issue discussed on this board seems to be the most likely fix if you run into an issue. And bottom line, even with the issues you can play and complete the game. Certain events wont happen as they should and things become exponentially easier or much more difficult but can usually be done just the same. And if they cannot, you can always use a cheat code for that particular scenario (there are dozens to go through).

And the point to going through all that... if you are a fan of city builder/God games, it doent get any better than this. Its simple to use, yet provides a good amount of depth. There are additional concerns on the military front that can legitimately be dealt with in a number of ways. Its just all around a great game.

Except if you want your city to feel like an ancient city. Then Caesar 3, Pharaoh and Caesar 2 would be much better options. This one feels more like running a theme park or a Disney cartoon city.