I do love this game dearly but every time I load it up I need to re-set my difficulty, screen resolution & gameplay speed - they never seemed to be saved. Any ideas?

That would only happen if the process is being terminated by Windows if the program stopped responding or if you manually stopped the process via Task Manager. You must close the game down in the appropriate manner, or settings won't be saved.

I am having the same problem & I am saving & shutting the game down properly.

I have the same thing. I save the game then exit thru the menu. When I reload the saved game it loads and defaults to "hard" "good effects on" and the speed is 90% every time.

God effects are always set on. The difficulty level is also set to hard when you start the campaign from the beginning. I believe these settings are saved when you use the Save Game feature.

I have a work-around, if anyone's interested.

The problem (I think) is that the game needs to modify the files "c3.inf" and "c3map.inf" in order to save your settings, but can't actually write to those files due to directory permissions. The directory "C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Caesar 3" is normally where the gog.com version of the game installs, and is also where the game expects to be able to write to, to save your save-games and settings.

On Windows Vista/7 (I don't know about XP), anything in Program Files is write-protected, and as such, Caesar 3 can't write your save game files there. So, Windows does something clever to resolve this: it makes the game think it's writing to the above-mentioned Program Files directory, but it's really being redirected to a special directory somewhere in your Windows user-profile - the "Virtual Store", which is kept in "C:\Users\YOUR USERNAME HERE\AppData\Local\VirtualStore".

So the problem is that when Windows intercepts Caesar 3's attempts to write its save-games files, it works, but for some reason, not with its settings files (c3.inf, c3map.inf).


SKIP HERE IF YOU JUST WANT THE FIX.

Here's the lazy and hack-ish work-around:

Right click the desktop icon for the game (or whatever you use to launch Caesar 3), and hit "Run as administrator". Start a new game (if you try to load a game, you'll see all your save games are gone; this is normal), change whatever settings you need to, and then exit the game. Re-launch the game as you normally would (ie, not as an admin), and you should now have the settings you want.

Do note that if you want to change your settings again, you'll have to run the game as an admin in order for them to persist.

The other solution is to copy and paste your save-game files from Caesar 3's VirtualStore directory into its Program Files directory, and always run the game as an admin. The game will no longer write to the Virtual Store, but instead, exclusively to its Program Files directory, with full write access for whatever files it needs to write.

Thanks.

Edit: Clarified a few things.

It works! Thank u so much Bapabooiee ^^

There's another fix (at least for windows 7) - if you have sufficient privilege, you can set the permissions on c:\program files\Impressions to be "full control" for users, and your settings will then be saved.

If you have a 64-bit processor, then it is "Program Files(x86)".

You can also disable User Account Control entirely to stop Windows using the Virtual Store.