Just bought this today, and can't get it to run no matter what Compatibility settings I use. I am running on Windows 8 64-bit. Any help would be appreciated.

The game seems to launch, the screen goes black, and I see the Windows blue loading circle, then it just goes back to the desktop and nothing else happens.

I am having the same issue, also on Windows 8, 64-bit. Any help would be awesome.

I was having similar problem, i went looking on the galciv2 site and found some troubleshooting common problem shortlist.

There was a download for a program to fix some registry issue..... i thought "pffft, this will never work". Ran the program and to my great surprise, it worked!

Don't have time to look for the link just now, i might later on....

link: http://forums.galciv2.com/452075

Number 3, the registry patch is what worked for me.

Edit: i forgot to mention that i only discovered the problem after trying to play Galciv3 and got ticked off after not being able to find any end turn option...."You think your smart with no end turn option eh? huh, Ok then, i will go and play galciv2, which does, so fxxx you Galciv3"

Same issue here but I already played the Steam version so I knew the game should run on my system. After running gc3_prefs_wipe in the 'Galactic Civilizations III' folder to game started without issues.

These guys have been talking about GalCiv1 and/or 2, not 3.

I had an old version of GC3 on my system at one point (probably a pre-release Steam version), and I was getting a similar error to the one described here.

Running gc3_prefs_wipe fixed it.