How do I do this?

same problem last night on my windows 8 (64) machine. tried every single compatibility option and none of the corrected the error. i've bought close to 30 games from GOG and this is the first time I've had an issue...are they normally pretty good about patching stuff like this?

Usually they are. Let's hope this fix this soon as well.

You right-click on the shortcut for the game and go into Properties. Then - Compatibility. It seems it doesn't work for everybody, but I don't have any problems.

I realized that it works in window mode. You have to Alt-Tab, then the game is minimized. When you klick on the game icon at the bottom of the screen to maximize it again the game pops up in window mode and there you can see everything. Seems that the problem only appears if you run the game in fullscreen mode. Maybe there is an other way to start the game in window mode, until GOG fixes it.

You're talking about a different problem here. On Win8 systems the game definitely freezes during the battle loading screen no matter whether you're doing that in fullscreen or windowed mode.

Running it in a window, in Windows 98/ME compatibility mode did get it running for me too.

Hi guys,

I'm sorry to hear that you are experiencing these issues as well.

My "Fix" was to disable raptor. I had an issue with it before and certain games.

After I disabled their overlay the game ran fine. Not sure if it was a happy coincidence or a resolution.

Hope this helps.

Please check my last post here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/warhammer_shadow_of_the_horned_rat/stuck_in_prepare_for_battle_screen_before_mission_sven_carlsson

Reinstalling with changed system locale fixed it for me.
But disabling certain services could indeed do the trick as well.

Copied from that thread:

This is the same response I got and it worked for me as well. Then I went through trying to figure out what was causing it, and for me it is Adobe Creative Cloud. If I have that running then the game will hang at prepare for battle. When I close the program entirely then the game loads just fine. I hope this information helps someone.

I've tried around a bit as well, when changing the system locale to UK, the mission loads, when changing to native, German locale it gets stuck.

Shutting down Outlook 2013 makes the game playable for me on Win 8.1

If that doesn't work, open up task manager and kill every single .exe application you can find.

I had the problem but already on startup. But I just ran the game in windows 98 compatibility mode and now it seems to be working. At least I have played through the first mission.

Game seems to work now after the last graphics driver update by AMD (v 15.30) on my win 7 64bit.never worked before.
Oh i have Radeon R9 270a

Great help, thank you!
I turned off Google Drive which is also a cloud and it works fine now.