I got Civ 4 Complete and installed it. It worked fine for about 15 minutes and then froze up. Now everytime I start it up, the movies are just solid colors and the main menu looks like the screenshot. I also get large line artifacts at random times radiating from the top left corner.

I've tried reinstalling the game, reinstalling DirectX, and messing with some INI settings, but I have yet to get anything good since those original (long missed) 15 minutes.

Civilization IV: Complete 1.7.4

Welcome to Civfanatics :band:

one general thing: your specs are just about at the minimum requirements - so the game will probably not run on the highest graphics settings ever.

Now what ini settings have you tried? Did you look for an updated graphics card driver?

Something I did finally got it to work, but I have no idea what. Sorry for the trouble.

My computer is a Sony Vaio, which not only stuck me with the worthless Geforce4 MX, but also makes it unreasonably difficult to update the driver for some reason. But I think I had the most recent one I could get.

And the INI settings, well I just went throught the general and debugging properties that looked like they would increase compatibility. I also enabled logging and took a look at that.

And, yes, my computer is borderline. But half the reason I bought this game is because it works with my (hellspawn) graphics card.