The Settlers III

What works

I wasn't able to make the game start

What does not

The installer, the game hangs while starting, check bug 19333

Workarounds

What was not tested

The rest of the game. 

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The Settlers 3 and the aLobby work without major issues only with the following Wine versions* (as of 2024-08-05):

• 8.15+ (and probably some earlier 8.x versions)
  
• 5.19-5.22
  
• 5.0-5.5
  
• 4.5-4.21
  
• 4.0.2-4.0.4
  
• 1.7.53-1.7.54

* tested versions were usually the "Staging" versions

Below is a list of versions known to cause major problems:

• Wine versions starting with 8.16 introduced some strange problems when trying to start the VPN of the aLobby for Multiplayer gaming
  • Fixed with newer aLobby versions
• Wine versions starting with 6.0-rc1 introduced major crash issues ("Structured Exception" / "SE") into the game
  
• Wine versions between 5.6 and 5.18 cause mouse problems when starting the game (bug 49347)
  
• Wine versions 5.7 and 5.8 cause problems with the aLobby. Fixed in Wine 5.9.
  
• Wine version 5.6 breaks the aLobby VPN (bug 48937). Fixed in Wine 5.7.
  
• Wine versions starting with 1.7.55 and below 4.0.2 (on the stable branch) and below 4.5 (on the devel-branch) introduced major mouse problems into the game (bug 38087)
  
  • On the staging-branch the affected versions are all below 1.9.0
• Wine versions below 1.7.53 crash on the Settlers 3 intro-movie (bug 5771) (the workaround for this bug is to disable the intro in the S3-settings)
• Wine versions below 1.5.26 cause freezes in multi player games (bug 29499)

This game requires much more processing power than it should, so unless you are using a relatively fast computer, it may run slowly (Bug 32478 and Bug 38169).

The used graphics card may also be of importance here: with NVIDIA (binary driver) the game is the fastest on Linux, with INTEL the slowest.

A workaround which makes at least the lag occurring every few seconds go away, is to start Settlers 3 on 1 CPU only with:

taskset -c 0 wine S3.EXE

If you want to play online using the aLobby, you have to start the aLobby the same way:

taskset -c 0 wine alobby.exe

Hint: taskset is only available on Linux, not on macOS

Only applicable to old Wine versions (< 8.0):

• Disabling CSMT (only easily possible with Wine Staging) increases the performance
  
• ATTENTION: Using the above taskset command without CSMT disabled decreases the performance instead of improving it!