When i try to start the game all i get is 1 second of the intro music and then it cuts off. At no time during this second of sound i get graphics just a blank screen, I've already tried the 16 steps on the support page. Just to clarify i cannot get past this even when i disable the intro in the setup. The game never gets past the black screen. Any ideas?

Edit: Just noticed the same pattern with AoW: The Wizard's Throne.

Use the config file and try selecting and/or unselecting a few of the settings. Some video cards need you to turn off the 'Direct Sound' while others need you to disable or enable 'Direct 3D'. And don't forget to set the language to English rather than leaving it blank which also causes a crash.

Search this forum for topics with crash, intro, and startup for a laundry list of other suggestions. And if you don't like all of them, hop over to aow2.heavengames.com for even more suggestions. There are a dozen different solutions to your problem since there are a dozen different potential causes.

But when you solve it, come back and join us for some multiplayer goodness. No experience needed, just a willingness to play!

Well I solved it, The DX pack didn't register until after two reboots wierdly enough, now both games work fine.

All three AoW games seem to have trouble on modern multi-core processors in Windows. All the various issues I was having with the games were solved by forcing the application to only run on one CPU.

There are several ways to do this. Here are two:

1) Start the game then go the the Task Manager (Shortcut: Ctrl+Shif+-Esc). Go to the "Processes" tab, right click on the process (will be called AoWSM.exe for AoW:Shadow Magic), then select "Set Affinity...". From the popup and un-check all but one CPU (I recommend using only CPU 0).

2) [RECOMMENDED method] There is a WinNT console command which essentially does the above at application launch. Instead of opening the console every time you want to play the game, you can create a very simple batch file to do it for you. First, navigate to the game's root directory; the one which contains the *.exe files. Create a new text file and name it "RunAoW.bat" or whatever you want, just make sure the extension is changed from .txt" to .bat. Open this file in a plain-text editor, like Notepad, and put in this line: "start /affinity 1 AoWSM.exe". If playing AoW 1 or 2, just use the name of the games executable in place of "AoWSM.exe". Then you can start the game by double clicking on the batch-file itself or create a shortcut which points the batch instead of the executable.

I´m having - from the sound of it - the same problem as nodnox.

Sadly, Daedeross solve does not work for me, plus I do not understand nodnox`s solve.

Could you please elaborate, nodnox?

Got ist solved by using a differend graphics driver - thanks all the same.