Setting up Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword

Note: This guide was compiled with Wine 0.9.55


After played Civilization IV for several weeks, I remembered that the expansion pack, Beyond the Sword, added all sorts of new features that I wanted to take a look at. After a civ-pep talk from my friend Brenden and step father(both huge civ fans), I went out and got a copy and installed it.

I put the disk in the drive and double clicked on "Setup.exe" to start the installation. It seemed to work smoothly at first, but as the game began to install it unexpectedly crashed. After some research, I found that the game can crash if it is missing some DLL files. To fix the problem, I made sure I had the following DLL's:

d3dx9_26.dll, d3dx9_29.dll, d3dx9_30.dll, d3dx9_31.dll, d3dx9_32.dll, d3dx9_33.dll, d3dx9_34.dll, mscoree.dll (This is the one I was missing. If you followed the other Civ 4 guide, this should be the only one you need), msxml3.dll, msxml3r.dll, msvcp71.dll, msvcr71.dll.

All of these DLL files can be found here (Virus free, too!)

Next I made sure I was using the msxml3.dll override (Note: If you followed the previous guide, these steps should already be done). I opened up winecfg, clicked the Libraries tab, and selected "msxml3.dll" as a new override for a library. I clicked Add and applied the changes. Next I clicked the Graphics tab and set the Vertex Shader Support to Hardware. I also clicked the checkbox to Allow Pixel Shader. I finally clicked OK and exited.

Now I was ready to install. I clicked "Setup.exe" and the game installed without a hitch.

The last issue I ran into was the fonts not being properly displayed. They looked like standard Times New Roman instead of the cool civ font. To fix it, I copied the Civ font out of the game into the windows font folder. Here's how I did it:

>cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Firaxis Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4/Assets/res/Fonts/sylfaen.ttf ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts

I started up the game, adjusted the video settings to 1280x800 (Note: You can go into your CivilizationIV.ini and manually adjust your resolution if it crashes on an in-game switch), then began a new game. Rock on!

In a final note, I believe this game is not recognized by Wine while it is in the CD drive. This means that you will have to get the No CD patch online. I won't post a link for legal reasons, but it is very easy to find with a simple google search. You may also want to update the game to the most current version (3.13) and apply the latest NoCD patch to it.