Some feedback....

[gbs]

I have experienced three freeze ups while playing the first tutorial and havn't been able to get throught it all the way yet. Once it was frozen so hard I had to perform the dreaded cold shut down of my computer. I will try the second tutorial.
Also, I don't know if this means anythin big or not but the load times on start up of the game seem overly long.
What I have been able to play I really like though.

[Pocus]

Freezes come 99% of the time from the video card. Before anything check your driver date, it must be from june 2006 or later.

Also you need a video card with 64 MB or more (128 is better).

[gbs]

I have an ATI, 128 meg card and I just updated the drivers in order to play OOTP 2007, a baseball sim. I have now gone back and played the same tutorial all the way through without the freeze.
This morning, while in the second turn of the april 1861 campaign, I got a crash to the blue screen with the message that the machine "needs to shut down in order to prevent dammage" or some such. I was moving a ship out of Galveston when it happened. Since getting this great game I have also notice some flashing of the screen from time to time. I think my Norton Auto protect, running in the back ground my be interfearing. When I get home tonight I intend to turn off auto protect and see if it makes a difference.

[Primasprit]

Hi gbs!

I had also some problems with the ATI 9600 and 9800 cards, which led to the blue-screen crashes you described. (However I didn't had the issue about the flashing screen.)
It seems to be a driver issue and appears only with certain driver versions. After I updated the drivers a week ago (and quit the ATI Control Center before I started the game, just in case) it run stable. So even if your drivers are only a month old, please try to update them again. It is also recommended to use the ATI driver uninstall tool to remove the drivers (you will find it where you can uninstall all your software) and restart the computer before installing the new one. Good luck!

[gbs]

Thanks. Are you saying to uninstall the current video card drivers and that I can do this from the control panel "uninstall software? Then I should restart the computer and go to the ATI site and download the latest driver for my card? Then install it.

Is this correct?

This may sound dumb, but if i unstall the video card drivers, will the computer screen still come on when I restart?

[Pocus]

yes, but with a lower resolution and without acceleration.

[gbs]

I did what you said and it is working much better. Thanks.

[Pocus]

Some serie of cards have random issues that we can't fix on our side. I suspect that depending of the release version of a driver, side effects are introduced or removed by the ATI driver team (or NVidia one) when they works on the novel features... as AACW only use plain old DirectX 8 features.