Civilization has been one of the best computer game franchises around. I started playing the games with the original CIV games (running on 486) and have bought every version since. So, when a release date for CIV IV was announced, I preordered the game from Amazon. What I didn’t do was select quick shipping, I selected the free option. Well it took about a week for the game to arrive. I was annoyed at first, but it truns out that I’m really glad I waited.
Why, cause well, Firaxis shipped the game with, lets call it a compatibility problem. Turns out if you are running an ATI video card (about ½ the people out there) and not using the absolute latest drives the game won’t start. Well, my drivers weren’t up to date, and even after upgrading them I still cound not start the game. Fortunatly, the week between the game’s release and me getting it enabled Firaxis to find a fix. I was looking around Firaxis’s site and found this work around. I finally got the game running and I’m happy with it now. Unfortunately for Firaxis, a lot of their fans are really pissed. All I can say is they should have put a little more into QA. The error I recieved was: Failed to Initialize Renderer. If you’re getting that error and are using an ATI Graphics card, try upgrading to the Catalyst 5.10 drives. Looks like they were released Mid October.
If that doesn’t work, which it probably won't, go to Firaxis’s Civ IV website and try their walk though. It starts you out installing the drivers, direct X, and the game in a certain order.
If that doesn’t work, the walk though tells you to download the PacBuild utility. This basically allows you to unpack some asset files. It takes up an additional 340 MB which is impressive since the game already takes up around 1.5GB as is.
After executing those three steps, I was able to get the game to run and I’m quite happy with the game play.
If you are getting a different error or are using an nVIDIA graphics card, you can try to update your drivers and unpack the file but I don't know if it will help. I suggest searching fan forums.
FYI: I've seen complaints about speed but I’m happy with the performance. My System Specs are nothing special:
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 XT 256MB
AMD Sempron 3100+
512 MB DDR 400 Memory
160 GB SATA HD
Sound Blaster Live