While playing the game, I found that whenever I initiated combat, or someone else initiated it against me, the game would lag and then freeze to an unplayable state. Alt-tabbing or using the windows key seems to alleviate the problem, as well as turning off 'Show Human Combat' and 'Show AI Combat', although this is a little irritating to have to do.

I have also found a few people who are experiencing the same problem, but cannot post them here.

Is there a solution to this problem yet?

Other than going back to Win XP? ;)

As far as I know, this is a problem only under Win 7 and, possibly, Win 8 (no idea about Vista). However, I don't know of any solution.

I'm just going to add also having the same problem under Win8
Update: Turning off explosions speeds it up slightly but it still takes nearly a minute per combat. Not moving the mouse during combat also seems to help.

me too.

Even on Windows 8.1

Sorry for dredging up an old post - I was having this problem too (only just purchased Gal Civ 1) - Intel GFX Chipset on laptop, maybe?

I switched from using the onboard Intel to my NVidia GFX card and the problem seems to have disappeared. Didn't turn any of the other gfx features on except forced vsync ON and triple buffer ON.

Might not be so much help to anyone not using intel onboard + nvidia discrete gfx on a laptop.

Cheers

Ya. I've not had the greatest luck with the integrated Intel graphics cards...

No fix for this yet? I used to have great fun playing this, but ever since going from Win 8.1 to Win 10 the game just locks down everything at the beginning of combat, it takes me ten minutes of alt tabbing and trying to click 'X'es that don't exist before the game gives me back the OS.

I'm so frustrated I feel like making a really evil pumpkin lantern and scaring some kids!


krashd

Better late than never, but I found out that it is related to the CPU speeds being too high and having more than one core.

You can get the animations to play again by reducing the number of cores to 1 and getting a CPU slowdown program to slow it down further.

To do this, run the game and then ctrl-alt-del to your task manager. Go to details and scroll down to galciv.exe and then right click/set affinity and make sure only CPU 0 is running.
Secondly, get a program like CPU grabber (google it) and slow down the remaining core by some odd amount. You'll have to play around with it. I tried it at 50% and, while the animations ran, they were somewhat janky. I got through the first altarian mission with grouped fleets no problem.

I have no idea if there is a way to make a batch file to automate this, or if it can be patched in, but at least it is a solution to your problem.

I just want to note that CTRL+ALT+ESC is a better way on operating systems newer than W7, as they invoke a different screen entirely.