Same problem here.  I do want a refund.  I see no reason to support a company that delivers a defective product. 

If I'm unable to play the game over the holiday weekend, chances are I will never play it and Stardock does not deserve the $10.  Only wish I could get the time I already spent trying to get the game to work back since it is worth more than $10 to me. 

I am sorry to hear about your trouble.

The Black screen bug plagues a certain video card configuration. You should contact the Stardock Support.

It is highly unlikely that this bug does happen on 3 machines.... I recommend you redownload the setup.

What video card driver version are you using on all 3 machines? Support will likely need that information.

Leaving this - for you of course terrible - issue aside, Sins  is rather well written game. Most certainly well above the standard of several other game companies.... who are multi billion dollar heavy.

It runs very stable and crashes are very rare under most circumstances.

The game does run fine under

XP

Vista

Win 7

Although I dont know if Trinity does support Win 8.

I bit the bullet and purchased the $20 Rebellion game and it works fine.  Conspiracy theorists would say this is deliberate to push you into buying the latest and greatest instead of the old game pack.  

If you bought it from steam you should be able to download it right away. If not they'll be e-mailing you a CD key more than likely.

Same issue, rebellion works fine but the stardock download of trinity is an absolute bust.  I get a full installation so that is not an issue. I have a new ati radeon card, latest drivers, windows 7, and 6 hours of wasted time trying to get past the black screen.  This is such a prevalent issue I can't see why stardock is not all over this as it is a major reputation killer potentially and this ridiculous process they have setup and changed over and over for digital downloads, switching platforms, serial keys as being read as used, activation emails never making it to your email inbox and on and on I'm pretty well done almost.  

I don't think its necessarily a prevalent issue. The real issue here is that I bet you anything Stardock support has not been working since Wednesday at the least because of the Thanksgiving Holiday in the US, yet Thanksgiving Sales have created a bunch of new customers, which is when support is needed the most. If it was a normal week I'm sure this thread would not be getting ignored.

The game has been out for some time. there was no reason for that installer to be broken in the first place

Downloaded expansion.  Works.  Awesome.  Happy.  Good. 

One thing that may help some of you is this:

1. Close Steam
2. Restart steam but do so by the "Run as an administrator method"
3. Delete the local content for the problem game
4. Reinstall
5. Verify cache
6. Play

This didn't work for GCI but it may work for Trinity...

The installer is broken.  I imagine someone simply paid little attention to it since Rebellion is the latest and greatest.  It is very likely that the root cause of the issue is insufficient resources at Stardock.  

Submitting a ticket to [email protected] will sort folks out who purchased direct. If you purchased via Steam or elsewhere, verifying your install files via Steam should fix things on incorrect install sizes.  If it doesn't, please contact Steam tech support.

For those with Trinity that do have correct installs, try running the game directly from its installation directory - Sins of a Solar Empire Diplomacy.exe and see if that works.