So this is a bit weird.

I've had Zeus for installed for a while, finally got to around to playing it, and it worked perfectly.

After a couple days of play, it started acting odd. I got the animation bug where none of the buildings animate save the trading post, which has gone to hyper speed.

This persisted for all of a day until I tried reinstalling to fix it. now when I run the game, I get a black screen, followed by a small black screen in the upper left corner of my monitor, followed by a smaller black screen in the same spot, followed by the game simply closing.

I'm on windows 10 64-bit and will note the game was working just fine out-of-box. I didn't add the widescreen mod or anything. The game just decided to not work anymore.

Is there any way to get this thing working again?

This was my situation as well. Try to launch the game as administrator (right click on Zeus.exe > Settings > Compatibility). And maybe set Compatibility Mode to Windows XP (SP3). One of these things helped me to launch the game again.

Ok, doing that got the game working again, though interestingly I had to run Zeus.exe directly from the game's folder to get it to launch. now that I've done that. The game can launch via gog galaxy.

I'm getting the graphics issue now though: buildings aren't animating, aside front the trading post, who really needs to switch to decaf.

It's like my dejavú :)
Try to reinstall the game again (delete all files in the folder) and start to use CPU limiter. For more info check the topic "Windows 7( probably xp too), slow gods spawn/bless/attack animations" (page 3 and 4). I am using CPU limiter and everything is fine.

Well I got the CPU limiting program, but it apparently doesn't want to hook into Zeus. I have to hit show all on the targeting screen to see Zeus.exe on the list, then selecting it gets a failure message. =/

1. Run Zeus
2. Alt+Tab to the desktop
3. Launch BES
4. Click on Target...
5. Find Zeus.exe (it has to be there if the game is running)
6. Click on Limit this
7. Set the values (-80 % and 17 ms)
8. Alt+Tab back to the game

That's more or less what I was doing, but instead of being allowed to limit the game I was getting an init failure error.

I figured it out though, BES needs to be run as admin to properly sink it's hooks in. Sadly the settings you gave doesn't seem to want to fix the buildings, I'll have to tinker with it a bit more.

Extraordinary. I encountered exactly the problems as you: game worked, but animations stopped - verified the files, but then found that the game would crash on launch.

I then updated my driver - still would not open using GOG Galaxy.

But then I ran it directly from the directory and it worked AND the animations were functioning!

Thanks for sharing this info. You've helped me too!