I tried all compatibility options. Skip intro checked true in setup. After launch main menu blinks for a moment after which the game crashes.

Run as administrator might be necessary.
Try launching the Setup Program (also set to compat+admin) and check all the settings, it might not have a language selected or something equally cursed.

There shouldn't be any need to mess around with the shortcut or enable anything special on Windows 10 or 11.
I have my AoW.exe set to completely default settings, everything works perfectly fine like this.

What might be causing issues is your game settings, the ones in AoWSetup.exe.
Check that you have have your settings equal to mine and see if that solves the problem.
You can of course play full screen or windowed and the email section does nothing either.

You should also make sure you have DirectPlay installed for this game, which is a legacy component.
For actual gameplay you also need the "ShowScene" patch, you can easily find it via Google.

Thank you for answers. I am sorry, I forgot about creating this topic. I did what you all suggested. The game still crashes shortly after loading main menu.

I've never seen the main menu crash, I wouldn't even know how to cause that.
It would seem to be related to either your settings or your pc in general.

From what I remember you need DirectPlay to play start a game, but not for the main menu.
There's also the ShowScene error when playing, for which there is a patch available.

Any other errors or glitches are normally caused by messing with the game settings.
Are you 100% sure your AoWSetup is identical to mine? Did you also set AoW.exe to defaults?

Do you launch the game and then it crashes after a few seconds without doing anything at all?

It shows main menu for less then one second after which it crashes to desktop like nothing happened.

Did you verify your AoWSetup.exe and AoW.exe as compared to mine in the attachments?

The only other suggestion I can make is to try starting the game with a mod installed.
Maybe something in your files is corrupted and the modded files could perhaps fix it.
It wouldn't hurt to test it at least, just to rule out any corruption in your local game files.

I don't personally use the GOG version, I use Steam. Maybe the issue is a GOG only thing?

You could also try checking the Even Viewer in Windows, maybe there's an error logged there.
Just open the Event Viewer and go to Custom Views --> Administrative Events, this filter should work.
Any Warning or Error messages logged will show up there, you can refresh it after the crash happens.

You could also try installing the game to a different location, preferably a different drive.

Just want to add that I am having the same issue as op, GOG version. I have followed all advice in this thread and it only launches to the menu for a second and then crashes.

Chiming in to say that I'm also having this issue, attempted all steps listed in this thread to no avail. I will say that I previously ran AoW 1 on this computer with no problem at all, and not that long ago - less than a year, at least. I wonder if it could be an issue with a (semi) recent Windows update removing or changing something that was otherwise needed.

Something to try ( mind you, i did this on Win7, steps for Win10 might differ slightly ) :

- Go into the Windows Control Panel
- Click System and Security
- Click System
- Click Advanced System Settings
- Go to the "Advanced" Tab
- Click on Performance -> Settings
- Go to "Data Execution Prevention" Tab
- Here, add the AoW.exe from your game directory

The game should (TM) now not crash any more in the menus.
At least this is what helped me, and it's a common problem for older games.

Hope this helps.

This doesn't help in Windows 11 - in fact, it made things worse: Now the game crashes just after the main menu appears, instead of crashing when I try to launch a Tutorial or enter the first Campaign mission.

Edit: Turns out I also own this on Steam, and that version works fine (except that you need to install the MapViewer.ShowScene patch). The "compat" version does NOT work, but the main version does.

I guess GOG hacked it up to work on Windows 7 or something, in a way that now causes problems on Windows 11?