Just bought Civ 3. On running it, I see the menu as shown in the image.

when quitting out (by alt tab and force-close), my windows fonts are changed.

How do I fix the missing text issue?

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Toshibs SatPro P50T-A
12GB RAM
Windows 10
Latest GOG version (as of time of this message)

NVidia GeForce GT 745M

Scaled fonts (125%), 1920x1080 resolution

This might be a solution for fixing the fonts in game. I'm not sure if this will work or not.

Go into the Civilization III install folder, then into the Conquests folder.
Rename or delete the LSANS.fot file inside that folder to something else.
Start the game.

For the font corruption in Windows, right click on the shortcut for Civilization III Complete. In the target line of the shortcut, change "Civ3Launcher.exe" to "Conquests\Civ3Conquests.exe". That's what fixed that problem for me. I don't know what that launcher does for Civilization III, it might fix another problem with the game that I haven't found yet. There is a spare copy of the shortcut in the install folder.

Is seems to be solved by changing the Language Locale on my Win 10 Laptop.

1) Open Control Panel - Region;

2) Choose the Administrative Tab;

3) Click Change system locale;

4) Change it to English (US);

5) Restart;

6) Run the game. The text should be back by now;

7) Change the system locale back to whatever it was before, the game should still behave normally.