Hi Everyone!
I've been reading around the forums a bit, and I've gathered that there's a lot of controversy about certain patches, and which one really works or not (and certain tradeoffs with using said patches over the other).
Long story short, it'd be great if I could get some advice on what would work best for me.
I have a Win7 64bit on a dual-core PC. I haven't had any problems playing with older games so far, and I'm confident that I can probably make a game work if I jury-rig it enough.
So my main issue is gameplay and graphics. Crashing after a few minutes is bad, but I don't expect to play a 100% stable old game on a modern PC, so if I can keep it to a single crash every few hours, I'd call it good.
I once downloaded a DKII Silver Edition, and played it vanilla and greatly enjoyed it on my laptop (Win7 32bit, single core). Now I hear that fanmade version of the game uses the nerfed 1.70—but I was pretty comfortable with it. I saw some posts that said the main bad thing about 1.7 is that the AI didn't attack and defend (but it fixed high-level units not appearing and combat pit issues). If that's the case, then I think I can be happy with 1.70, since I'm a turtler-player at heart, and I like the economy and base-building aspect over the military one.
I did experience some crashes every 2 hours of gameplay though.
So I got the DKII from GOG as a gift from a friend, and I believe that it uses the 1.70, and has good support, came cheap (and legal!), and supposedly is meant to work with less problems on my modern system.
Should I still patch it though?
Right now, I'm torn between:
Vanilla GOG (v1.70)
1.73f (am I correct is assuming that the one that can be downloaded from http://keeperklan.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=15 is the "f" version?)
1.80 (easily found on other sites)
NOTE: I never plan to play multiplayer, so that's never an issue for me.
I was all set to go with 1.73(f), but then I read that there were some issues with the campaign level 1? On that same thread, I found some helpful posts that supposedly would fix the issue, but what's the accepted solution? Or is this no longer an issue with the latest version of 1.73? Is 1.73 such a big upgrade to 1.70 that it's worth the headaches of fixing the campaign map level 1 issue?
To make the issue even more confusing, there's supposedly a HARDWARE ACCELERATION PATCH from GOG (I can't seem to be able to find it, even on the GOG site). Is this also a necessary patch (and if so, anyone have it?)
Any words of advice, anyone?
UPDATE: I've installed the vanilla GOG, and I've got it working with little problems without having to edit anything (like compatibility or affinity). I just had to make sure to turn off hardware acceleration. However, I've been playing pet-dungeons, so I don't know if there are any issues with campaigns. Either way, any advice yet if I should upgrade to 1.73? Thanks!