How do you play Age of Wonders without it crashing?

When playing Age of Wonders (the first one) via Steam on Windows 8, the game constantly crashes with event viewer exceptions. What can be done to deal with this? Is there something I can do with the Steam version of the game or would I need to acquire a different version? Would a different operating system be better?


I've found this steam community post discussing similar issue. As a solution, they suggest using unofficial patch (so proceed on your own risk, backup your data and use anti-virus): https://github.com/int19h/aow-patch .