Well, playing without events is not recommended for this scn. You need the right labels.txt especially for one reason: I changed the term "Barbarians" in the labels.txt to "Unknown", so all events that create Barbs (these are not much) have owner=Unknown. If you use other labels, the game finds only "Barbarians" in the labels and gives an error...
So you should only change some terms in the labels.txt, especially the "Barbarians" thing. If it does not work with the original MGE labels, take a FW labels file and change it there.
Other changes I´ve done in the labels should not affect the gameplay, they are mainly for the atmosphere, e.g. changing the term "City" to "Base", "River" to "Deep Sea Stream", or "Road" to "Transport Tube" etc, etc.
BTW, the events file may also be too big for FW. Then you could split it into two parts (make an eventschange during the game). Since there are a lot of IFTURN events, you can easily keep all other events in both parts , but have the earlier IFTURN events in part one, the rest in part two...
Hope this helps...
Contact me if there are still problems.