** What you can do if you are having these and other issues**

[brbdc]

Regardless of what system and hardware you are running this is at least what you can do.

1) Update drivers for your video cards.
www.nvidia.com
www.ati.com

This is where most fixes might and will come from.

2) Update Windows
Get service pack 2. Fix gaps in that stuff. General fix.

3) Check your settings.
Start menu> Run> DXDIAG. Look for Direct X 9 and driver versions here.

4) Close all other programs that might be eating memory and cpu cycles.
Right click and close things in the system tray.
Start menu> Run> MSCONFIG
Disable unnecessary programs. I am suspicious of memory leaks from what I read in other threads.

This is what you can do with your drivers and windows issues.
Next we tweak the Civ 4 settings.

Load the game. Go to options.
Under graphics and Sound. Play with them. Try higher, lower settings. Turn off Anti Aliasing. Turn it on. Change resolution to low settings, high settings.
Click off and on all those animations, zooms, health bars etc.
Restart the game. Now test with tiny maps, huge maps.

This is all you can do. Im not promising it will fix anything but for many people this is the road to starting to find a solution. Look back to this website and the civ4 main site for patches in the coming days and the graphics sites will probably release drivers that solve alot of the common problems. This is unfortunate but common for games that have such a wide audience. I played for 4 hours last night with my problem (described below) and I think its a fun game. Dont let this stuff get you down. They have to fix it.

My Specs are:
p4 1.6 ghz
nVidia geForce3 64 megs
1 gig ram.
on board sound.

The problems I have aren't fatal but do take away from gameplay and from trolling these threads I can tell it isnt specific to one set of cards, newer or older. People with 7800 GTX are having the same issues as GeForce 2 and MX cards. I havent read as much about ATI but I think that they are having similar issues.

Sound cuts in and out during the wonder movies. Tooltips were laggy. Gets laggy when it zooms in for City building a wonder. Lag between keyboard input and game response. Two examples: 1) When I want to move a guy. I could press... left. left. up and he would move in previous civs. In this one I have to press left. then wait. then left. then wait some more. then up. Or 2) when I even press enter at the end of the turn. Takes like a second or 2 of lag delay before processing end of the turn.

-brbdc
"another fan enduring a new release"