Civilization IV and V on Windows II

[HJD3]

I recently bought a new Lenovo Legion laptop. I am running Windows 11 and have an NVIDIA graphics card and an Intel processor. My default screen resolution is 2560 x 1600.

After getting this new laptop I bought Civ III Complete, Civ IV Complete and Civ V Complete from Steam.

To date I have had no problems launching Civ III. It has worked every time. However, after having successfully launched both Civ IV and Civ V, I am now finding that Civ IV only successfully launches sporadically, and Civ 5 launches but only within a small window, not full screen. I am puzzled about what to do.

Does anyone think this is a screen resolution issue (I have tried several), or is it DirectX, or something else that is causing the issues with Civ IV not always launching and Civ V now only launching in a small window?

The downloads of all three games from Steam occurred in the last days of December 2023, so I have assumed that all were up to date with the latest versions of what I needed to play.

Any ideas would be appreciated, and thank you to the community.

Kindest regards.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Civ 4 at least is a direct x 9 game and windows 11 might not have the dx9 end user runtime installed by default. You can get it here

Download DirectX Redist (June 2010) from Official Microsoft Download Center

The Microsoft DirectX® End-User Runtime installs a number of runtime libraries from the legacy DirectX SDK for some games that use D3DX9, D3DX10, D3DX11, XAudio 2.7, XInput 1.3, XACT, and/or Managed DirectX 1.1. Note that this package does not modify the DirectX Runtime installed on your Windows...

www.microsoft.com

I'd have thought that steam would take care of that on first install but you never know!

No idea about civ 5 though.

 

[HJD3]

Thank you for the help.

Since my original post, I discovered that I am actually running DirectX 12.

And in regard to Civ V, there is actually a menu choice on the launch page. If I make no selection or choose DirectX 9 then the game does not launch into full screen mode. If however, I choose the DirectX 10/11 option the game launches successfully. There is currently no DirectX 12 option on the launch page.

I appreciate your time and help.

 

[vorlon_mi]

My experience running Civ3 on newer computers points to a screen resolution issue. Civ3 was released more than 20 years ago, when screens had much smaller resolution. My workaround on my current laptop is to manually set the resolution much lower (say 1366x768), launch the game and let it autoadjust to the resolution it wants. After exiting the game, manually change the resolution back to full/recommended resolution.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Pretty much, using keepres=1 in conquests.ini I play comfortably at 1920x1080 but the icons are small and I wouldn't go any higher

 

[coolhandluke11]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/borderless-gaming.mirror/ <<< If all other things fail i used this software in civ 5 because 1280x720p wasnt supported in fullscreen. Just drag the civ shortcut to the programs menu add it to the righthand side start the game as normal and it should open the game in fullscreen.