I bought Civilization IV Complete yesterday and the rotten thing keeps failing to autolaunch - the game works fine on my neighbour's machine, but not even a copied DVD will launch on my computer. My machine is barely 6 months old and runs other DVDs fine, just this one game won't work and it's eating me up inside. Any ideas out there in boffin-land?

:band: Welcome to CFC :dance:
Does it start when you use the shortcuts it installs? Maybe just the autostart does not work with your setup... Also did you try starting it from the .exe files in the Civ4, Warlords and BtS directories it installs to?

So I managed to copy the game to my hard-drive and installed it from there - now it won't launch because it's looking for a directx file that I don't have yet; I'm downloading it as we speak, will post further notes on the progress of this bamboozling episode...

Well, two-thirds of the way there; I managed to get the directx patch for the game and now Civ IV and Warlords both run, but BTS is still looking for a directx file that is out of date - I'll finish the game I started then try re-installing the game from scratch...

if you wanted to try again more quickly I'd imagine you could probably locate your save file and just make a copy before you uninstall/reinstall

Uninstalling it will prompt you and ask if you want to keep the save files I believe. In any event thaey are in your My Documents/My Games Folder