I like the old school Settlers games. I have never played 3th and 4th part longer than a few hours, because of bugs and it is very sad, cause they look and feel very very good. Now 5th and 6th parts are good, but it isn´t settlers anymore. Then Rise of Cultures is only german, so I decided to go back to S3,S4. I thought that there will be no problem find patch today. But I´m ****ed again.
1.After I think 3 days of searching web and trying to make the game compatibile with new hardware, I ended up with poor sound and black boxes, which were mentioned hundred times in this forum.
2.Ok, so I decided to play with them, but I can´t, because I was not able to find my save from previous day!
3.OK! I restart firt mission, but was not able to finish it, because of missing swords. Serfs take them from weaponsmith to barracks, but they just don´t appear in barracks, so I can´t train any swordman.

Is there any way to make this game playable?

Hi Mathuzzz,

I haven't tried S3 on Vista but there are help topics on that to try and make it work.

For updates on the games you could try http://www.settlers3.com/download/update.htm

Or

http://www.gamershell.com/download_4262.shtml

Actually, I have XP and no problem with that...I think it is because of my sound and graphic card. They may be too advanced for the game. I have already install the patch. While I was searching this forum I realized that there is no guaranty solution for "black boxes"

Saying the game is full of bugs is a bit of a blanket statement.The only known bug that as yet has no easy fix is the black box one,only a problem when using Nvidia 8 and 9 series.

You said you have patched the game,which patch did you use?

As a general rule you dont have to change the compatibility to get XP to work,did you recieve error messages to make you change this?

If you played a mission and saved it then patched the game,thats the reason your save is gone,every time you patch the game it deletes the saved games.

In 9 years of helping solve Settlers4 problems I have never come across the weapons disappearing.

Did you buy the game in a store or download it?

Sword thing resolved itself. When I load my game they started to appearing.
Save cannot disappeared because of patching, cause I wasn´t able to run the game before I used patch(1516), then changed compatibility to windows 98 because of error. I now use more saves for certain.
It is sad that one must spend days to run his favourite game or be bothered with graphic and sound problems. Not just settlers, but populous, thief etc...best solution is to buy old set.

Simple solution to the graphics bug buy a radeon card as these dont appear to have the blackbox issue. We did have a patch for some nvida cards but we seem to have lost the link in the old forums closing.

Thanks for your replies...
One more question. Is there some way to emulate sound card or something, because sound is pretty bad.
Thank you!