Civilization tends to drain my laptop battery to nothing in about an hour. Does anybody know if tweaking any of the in game settings will reduce the drain? I'm going to be traveling with the laptop and would like to extend the battery life as much as possible.

1) reduce graphics settings
2) safedisk requires the cd to be in the drive during startup - not after: you can turn off (eject) the cd drive once the game is started. Note: you will likely need to restart the computer before you can start the game again afterwards (if you quit it once).
3) as with all applications: reduce the background light for your monitor

Pardon me for butting in, but besides battery drain, there's been issues and a lawsuit with laptops overheating. The CD drive seems to generate a lot of extra heat (My Gateway is like a space heater!), and removing the CD after startup helps a lot.

Turn out the sound too ;)

I believe lowering the sound is not actually making a difference. The sounds are still accounted for in the sense that the computer generates them yet the output level is reduced to 0.

Also I think that it matter very little if the speakers are put to work or not. If I am not mistaken the intensity of the sound is reduced by increasing the resistance on the speakers. Therefore lowering the sound on the speakers generates a little it more heat in the resistors so the energy is wasted anyway.

The true energy saving tips would be to reduce the brightness of the screen, to get the CD out of the tray and to set the processor to use as little power as possible. You may experiment a bit as to what lowering the processor power does for the lifespan of the battery while playing Civ and see if that it is worth it. From experience I know that the speed of the game also drops considerably when lowering the processor output.

Not lowering the sound, muting the game in the options. That will give the sound card a rest and will also reduce the CPU usage. In fact , as you said, anything that cuts the CPU usage ( like disabling the wonder movies ( use of a external program ) ) will help.