I just got Civ4 and played an entire game without any problems. I just started my second game, and now the cows/elephants are appearing as shadows(I can still see other kinds of resources). Toggling "Animations Frozen" makes them appear/disappear. I didn't have any problem with the animals animating last game, and I haven't changed my graphics settings at all since then. For what it's worth, I have a system that doesn't meet the minimum reqs, but I used RivaTuner to turn some things down to make the game playable(I have the same problem about animals appearing even with all the settings turned up). I found a few threads about this, but no real answers. Just wondering if anyone found a solution. Thanks!

For what it's worth, I have a system that doesn't meet the minimum reqs, Thanks!

Please spend more moneys and come back! Welcome to Civ4 and Civfanatics. Have a nice day! :)

I love the Civ series, but there's no way I'm buying an entirely new laptop to play the game. Is there any quick fix for this?

Figured out one solution -

I'm using a tweak program to adjust my graphics - I had the pixel + vertex shaders set to "disabled." They had to both be at least 1.1 for the cows to show. You NEED to restart your computer when you change these - this was what was driving me crazy, as I kept setting them to different values but not restarting, and Civ showed no difference. NVHardPageSE doesn't tell you to restart your computer after adjusting these, but you do need to.

If you have an under-req system like me(1.4GHz Pentium M, 512MB Ram, Go5200 w/ 32MB), you can get something like RivaTuner or NVHardPage and turn everything to the lowest values(but remember to leave the shaders at 1.1!). If you have a widescreen laptop, turning off the display adapter scaling and going for centered output will give you a sizeable speed boost. Also, going into the config and setting MemSaver = 1, BinkCopyAll = 0 can help a little bit. For me the Omega drivers are also a big help. Doing all this, the game is playable and runs fairly smoothly.

If you don't mind not seeing the cows/other animals, or if you don't mind having animations frozen, completely disabling the shaders will give you another big speed boost.