Setting up Civilization IV

(Note: This guide was compiled using Wine 0.9.44)

After much delay, I decided it was time to get Civilization IV running on goz. To my delight, the installation was relatively painless AND the game runs almost flawlessly.

To begin, I shoved the disk into the CD drive and installed (Note: Some people have complained about the installer crashing near the end of the install. It is fine if it does it because all of the files are installed, but I didn't have this issue). Once the main game was installed, I had to find the latest patch (1.74) and patch the game. After downloading it here, I went installed it without a hitch had Wine.

For whatever reason, Wine does not recognize the game CD as a valid disk when attempting to play. To circumvent this, there is a website that is readily available for no CD cracks for almost any game. Because it is not exactly legal, I am not going to go into detail of how to install it. However, the no CD crack does work with Wine and is very easy to find by a quick google search.

Next I had to grab some DirectX libraries and dump them into the system32 folder in Wine. So I downloaded d3dx9_26.dll, d3dx9_31.dll, d3dx9_32.dll, d3dx9_33.dll, msxml3.dll, msxml3r.dll and copied them into my Wine system32 directory (Note: The location is typically /home/username/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32).

Once the libraries were installed, I had to go into 'winecfg' and change a few settings. So I typed:

>winecfg

Next, I selected the 'Libraries' tab. Once in the tab, I selected 'New override for Library' and scrolled down to 'msxml3.dll'. After clicking 'Add', I next navigated to the 'Graphics' tab. Once there, I changed my 'Vertex Shader Support' to 'None' (Note: If you leave this enabled, the game seems prone to crashing or graphical glitches). After that, I clicked 'OK'.

Finally, I had to adjust some settings in the CivilizationIV.ini file. To do this, I went into the 'My Games' folder (Note: By default, this should be in your home directory and named 'My Games').

>cd ~/My\ Games/Sid\ Meier\'s\ Civilization\ 4/

Then I manually edited the ini file:

>vim CivilizationIV.ini

There are a bunch of settings that are adjustable (You may want to fine tune some things to your liking), but there are only 2 settings that need to be changed to get the game to run correctly. First, the EnableVoice option needs to be changed from 1 to 0. Afterwards, it should look like this:

>EnableVoice = 0

Lastly, the game resolution must be changed in the ini file instead of in the game (Note: I tried changing it in the 'Options' tool bar when the game was loaded but it crashed it). So I scrolled down to ScreenHeight and changed the value to 800. The final readout should look like this:

>ScreenHeight = 800

Then I changed the ScreenWidth to 1280. The final readout should look like this:

>ScreenWidth = 1280

After that, I wrote the changes and quit. Once the game started, I went into the 'Options' menu and changed the game settings to their highest value and restarted the game.

As a final note, there seems to be some kind of ongoing problem when the game starts. For a minute or two, the loading screen hangs on 'Init Audio'. Once the game starts there is no problem, but the extra time it takes for the game to load can be annoying. I am still looking for a fix to the problem.