I have noticed that certain water structures don't show their animations. For instance the water fountains don't show that they are operating. Also, burning buildings don't look like they are on fire. My prefectures are staffed yet the building doesn't have the flag on them that show they are indeed staffed. I know that these buildings are operational because i can see the prefect carrying water to the burning buildings.

Anyone know a workaround or fix?

Curious ... do you have the game installed in Program Files? If so, try playing the game as admin or moving the game out of that folder. Another thing to try is setting the compatibility of game to XP.

Same issue here, tried what Crazy Dave suggested and no luck.

Same issue here - there are no building animations including fires, flags over structures like prefectures and general building animations for places like warehouses etc.

Tried:

- running as a admin
- compatibility modes (all available)
- limiting the game to 16bit colors
- running in different resolution modes

The PC is ran on Win8 with GTX860m and i7-4700hq on board. Would appreciate any tips how to resolve this issue, as the game is simply unplayable for me given I can't see which structures work and which are unoccupied.

Restarting your PC is currently one of the most reliable methods of solving this bug. It happens on all the classic city builders (Caesar, Pharaoh, Zeus and Emperor) and restarting the PC fixes it.

Tried your suggestion and it works... sometimes :)

Did some testing and 3 out of 4 times it's fine - the animations are where they are supposed to be, but for some reasons, there are reboots where they will not work as supposed to (meaning there are none).

Guess it's still better than not having the animations at all, and all I need to do is keep rebooting until things load up properly for the game to work as planned...

Cheers for the answer!