I'm having the same issue. also the building I set only look like broken greek columns or something. Some animations like the tide also feel a bit strange.

EDIT: Just noticed that time is advancing really fast, like a month in-game per second. I'm running the game on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit, on a Lenovo g470 laptop (sandy bridge i5, 4 gb of ram, intel hd 3000 with updated drivers).

Sounds like you've accidentally switched on an overlay. Try hitting the 'overlay' button on the toolbar to the right and then hit 'normal'. Options>Speed>90%. When the game is turned to 100% speed, it's insanely fast. As it should be, since there are times when you've got nothing to do but wait for a big fuckoff pyramid to finish.

Thank you. You were right about the overlay. It seems the speed feels natural at 60-70%, looking at the models animation, at least on my PC.