Game crashes shortly after starting solo game

[BrentSeymour]

Stratagus failed to load game data.
If you just launched the game without any arguments, this may indicate a bug with the extraction process.
Please report this on
https://github.com/Wargus/stratagus/issues/new, and please give details

That was the relevant part of the error message except for check for stdout.txt, stderr.txt and an extraction log in the folder....

Game keeps crashing shortly after starting solo games, seems to be when I build a few buildings and units. Also I may be setting up games wrong. I couldn't set up a multi player game with AI would always crash with this message.
I downloaded and executed the war1gus installer, I have the windows DOS CD, it extracted and it starts and runs, campaign seems to work reasonably.