When the opening video is over, the screen goes black and I get the following error Message:
Access Violation at address 715A6A93 in Module AClayers.dll 03485280. and the game crashes.
BTW If I try to skip the opening video I get the same error message.
I will email GOG about this.
BTW this is NOT an Language issue, since I am in the US and my computer is set to English as the default language. I have tried a couple of compatiblity settings and no good.

I solved the problem by setting the preferences manually in the setting program that you get on the intial splash screen.
Wierd thing is I set everything to highest,,when I thought that lowering the prefs would help.
I also checked "CHange Resolutions" and set the Resoltion to the one that was nearest my desktop Resolution. If you are having the problem you might try that.

I had the same problem.... you might need to disable Data Execution Prevention (DEP) when running Age of Wonders, well at least it worked for me.... always seems to cause issues on these older games when running 64 bit Vista in particular.
Don't worry, you aren't disabling this for all things everywhere if you are concerned your turning off something vital, it will only be turned off while playing AoW... or indeed anything else you decide to turn it off for!
Do the following:
1. Go to the control panel
2. Click on "Classic view" on the left of the control panel window (if you don't already have it set to this)
3. Double click on "System"
4. Click on "Advanced system settings" on the left
5. Click the "Advanced tab" (it might open up on this)
6. Under "Performance" click the "Settings" button
7. Click the "Data Execution Prevention" tab
8. Make sure the "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select" dot selection thing is ticked/dotted.
9. Click "Add" at the bottom, and navigate to your AoW installation... and add "AoW.exe"
10. Do the same for "AoWCompat.exe" also
11. Click OK and close the windows etc!
And it should work fine! If it doesn't, my compatibility settings for AoW are on:
Windows NT 4.0 (Service pack 5)
And I have the "Disable desktop composition" ticked.
Hope that helps!

i had the same problem, disabling DEP fixed it, thanks for the tip...

I did not need to disable DEP, of course I am running XP which is probably why.
There was a wierd bug with Age of Wonders 2 where you could not load scenarious until you goofed around with the settings.

Disabling DEP worked for me as well, thank you.

The DEP fix did not work for me. When I try to add Aow.exe to the DEP list, it says "This program must run with data execution protection (DEP) enabled. You cannot turn off DEP for this program." and it doesn't get added to the list. Error is still there.

Solved my issue!

Thank you very much!

Adding AOW.exe and AOWCompat.exe to the DEP exception list is enough under Windows 7.

Thanks!