Hey guys!
I sent this in as a help ticket but thought I'd post it here to see if any of you may be able to help me with the problem I'm facing.
I'm already a proud owner of this game and had problems trying to play it on my Vista installed computer so I gave up on it awhile back. When I saw Alien Nations available on GOG (and for Vista) I bought and downloaded it from the website and it worked perfectly!
Now that That Nations is out, I went and immediately bought the game hoping that I will finally be able to run it on my machine. Unfortunately, I'm experiencing the same type of lag problem when in game. No problems on installation, intro works fine, but when selecting single player and any of the campaigns including the tutorial, the game starts to lag. It's as though the FPS (?) is really slow. The sound sort of echos throughout as well. I've tried using the Troubleshooting Tool to configure the lowest settings, tried a couple of variations but it still doesn't work.
The funny thing about it tho, is the minute I decide to change the resolution in game it works okay, but then the lag slowly creeps up. I change the resolution to something else again, it works the same; it'll be fine at the start then it'll lag out eventually. This is in a span of say maybe 3 to 5 minutes from the start of change by the way.
I've read the support articles and did the necessary changes for my Vista machine but alas it's still not working. If there's a way, I'd really appreciate a feedback on how to fix this problem. Not sure if it's a game or a machine thing, but any help would be great.
I love this RTS game to bits and pieces!
:D
~ Xennie

Yup - me too, I should totally be running this thing better than I am - bought it yesterday and it gets laggggggy unless I zoom all the way in - weird.

I have the same problem on my Alienware m11x. It uses a GeForce GT335M. Luckily it also has an Intel GMA built in. The game works fine with the Intel GMA.

I spoke to someone from GOG team and get unofficial info how to solve our problem. The only way to make some (not very) good people to fix this problem, is to constantly send e-mails via tech support page and asking for help and providing information about computer configurations etc.

I was wonder how is it they didn't fix it already. Well, I get replay from one of the team. He said, that they have many complains about other games and since the number of that complains are bigger than those of The Nations fans, they get their hands on others titles.

Now you know what to do - SEND, SEND & SEND e-mails. Once a week till GOG make it playable.

I don't think it's a matter of GoG not caring about their customers, on the contrary, if they didn't care they wouldn't have hardly anty of the games that they have or be selling them as cheaply as they are and those games still working for the majority of users.

I've had this game for a few years now, when I first bought it I had a beast of a video card and the game ran fine, but that card fritzed out and I had to get a cheapy replacement, to make a long story short, it runs really crappy now and the game just isn't programmed "correctly" from the start, it requirements as far as video cards is much cheaper than an equivalent game made at the same time. It's not GoG's fault, all they can do is patch it to work for the majority of systems on the market and if you've got a crappy vid card, even though like mine it can play Oblivion on near max settings, it's not going to play Nations.

I'm just happy that the other games I've bought from GoG run fine and when I'm once again employed, GoG will be my first stop for games again.

Anyone experiencing lag can give the following a try, though I have no guarantees it will work.

Previously I was looking for a way to change the games resolution and found out about the 'setRegTrouble.exe' tool. Within this tool, as well as the ability to change the resolution, you could also change the texture limit and AGP textures.

After experimenting I had noticed several things; my game crashes on startup when the texture limit is set to infinite, the game lagged horribly when the texture limit was set very low, and also lagged when the resolution was set above 800x600 especially when the game is zoomed out.

So after setting the texture limit to 4000 and locking the resolution at 800x600, the game is running very smoothly. I didn't have bad lag issues from the start so what others are experiencing could be completely unrelated and this might not fix it, but I thought it should at least be brought to attention.

I have no idea what turning AGP Texture Memory On or Off does, but I have mine set On currently, since that is the games default setting.

Quick Answer:
-Go to the games directory, then; The Nations Gold/tools
-Run the setRegTrouble.exe
-From the Settings drop-down box at the top select the Benutzerdefiniert option
-Tick the box in each of the three categories
-Set AGP Texture Memory to On
-Set Texture Limit to 4000
-Set Resolution to 'fix' and to 800x600

If you wish you can set the Resolution option to user defined and change it from the in-game options instead.
And I know 800x600 is low, but I noticed that even when changing it a bit higher, like 1024x768, the game would run slower, much slower when zoomed out. Running at standard resolutions like mine, 1680x1050, makes the game basically unplayable.

If anyone has any other insight I'd be glad to listen, and I'm sorry for those who might have tried this and it didn't work. I had just come across these results when experimenting and thought I'd post them for those who might be interested.

Vince

The game is unplayable on Windows 10, I tried hard to get it working on a modern laptop and a desktop, but the framerate is so terrible, it's simply unplayable and the cursor flickers and can't be used.

But I did manage to easily get the game up and running - over a year after purchasing it - on Linux! Fedora 31 KDE spin with almost all Wine packages, and I just click on the exe install which sets up the game nice and quick (faster than on Windows). And I can use the troubleshooter program as well to set 1280x720 resolution. The game runs just great, I'm so happy! Finally I'm able to play since I got this neat game!

I do not know if this message will help anyone, given that OP made this in 2009, but hey the game was on sale so maybe other people bought it and have the same problem. I've just bought it myself and the game was lagging pretty bad. Not unplayable bad, but main menu dude was unable to follow the arrow, the characters were moving like stop motion figures and the screen moved with a slight delay.

So here is the solution that I've found with my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER: I've opened the NVIDIA control panel, and set Vsync to always be on (Manage 3D settings/Program Settings/Blitzkreig II (name of The Nations for some reason)). Suddenly everyone moves smooth as butter, no screen tearing or imput delays and works on any resolution.
Let's hope it helps some people.