I copied my 3 cds into one directory and ran the installer from there with Wine. It installed perfectly fine. I was even able to watch the intro, navigate all the menus and start a game. However, about 1-30 seconds after starting the game, I get the infamous "Age of Empires 3 has encountered a problem and needs to close" pop-up with the "send/don't send" buttons. I was unable to determine any error from that.
I ran it from a terminal and I believe the important part of the output is:
err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"age3.exe"
err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"4.105.919.3236"
err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"deformerdll.dll"
err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"0.0.0.0"
err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"00001363"
Can someone tell me what this means and what I need to do to get AoE3 working?
I looked on the cd for deformerdll.dll and also checked Winetricks for it. I didn't find it.
Note: I have already tried the methods suggested at WineHQ and it still doesn't work.
For anyone interested in the whole several page output of terminal, here it is.
Your best chance to install this is using PlayOnLinux as it'll configure wine to work with Age Of Empires III (and the various expansions) for you.
You may want to check the WineAppDB. I believe this addresses your problem, no?