Alright, here's a real humdinger of a problem. I just freshly re-installed this game after having had a couple of good old Age of Kings games, and I noticed something incredibly funky with my campaign and a few other bits and bobs.
I load up the campaign, and during the scripted movie sequences that feature the characters speaking, it's like someone is holding the "skip it, don't want to hear it," button down, so everything zooms by on turbo mode when I do actually want to hear it/read it. Kind of annoying, to be honest.
Second issue is the music and ambiance sounds of my home city. While I'm on the screen that says "Single Player," "Multiplayer," "Help and Tools," etc, I hear nothing but the button clicks, which is fine, but I'd like to hear the orchestral score over my 7.1. I have to pop into my offline home city and then back out in order to hear the ambiance, but still no music.
During skirmishes, I usually have the gumption to allow myself a smirk or two everytime I hear Ivan the Terrible or Napoleon taunt me or praise me based on the game's events (Computer taunting) and it's wonderful, only in the midst of all these sound related problems, I don't hear a darn thing anymore and it's a little empty. I can get unit sounds in there, and the boom of the cannons while offscreen still shake the house (I have a very wicked 7.1...) but there's no "What spirit aids you that you advance in age so quickly?" to follow up.
I should also mention that I've had this game installed on this particular machine already once before, when tWC was fresh off the production PCs, and I didn't have this kind of issue before hand
Suggestions, folks? I'm eager to get this fixed. I've tried updating my sound card drivers, video drivers, but so far nothing seems to really work. I'm running the following below
Pentium 4 3.2Ghz Celeron
Soundblaster Audigy 4
ATI Radeon X1300 (Though I don't see what video would have to do this. I can run the game full blast graphics. Here as a Just-In-Case thing.)
1 Gig of RAM