Civ 4, craptastic install process

[The_EE]

Well, I decided to take the deal on Direct2Drive and wow.. I wish I had not now. I am real close to contacting my bank and telling them to reverse the charges for this POS game. Never in my life ( been gaming since the atari 2600 came out ) have I had such trouble getting a game to freaking work.

Picked up the Civ 4 with all add on's.

Installed civ 4, tells me I am missing the MSVCR71.DLL, ok.. whatever.. I check and sure enough I have it, its in the system32 folder I believe. So I go looking around for info, someone made mention I should throw it in the folder with Civ 4, ok.. new error message, 0xc000007b I believe it was. Someone made mention that I should try patching the game. Download the patch from Direct to drive, who happens to have the absolute worst layout for storing patches, it freaking deletes all the files for Civ 4 and then crashes.

Win 7 ultimate
All drivers up to date
Direct x up to date

At wits end with this game after 2+ hours of trying to install it.

 

[The_EE]

Direct X log below

 

[The_EE]

Think I might have found a problem... not sure.

It appears things such as my _Civ4Config are freaking shortcuts? WHy would it put my config file for the game in the "%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\My Documents\My Games\Civ 4\CivilizationIV.ini" ?

I do a search for _Civ4Config and CivilizationIV.ini and I cant find either file on my computer. What the hell is going on? Did Sid and the development team come down with a fatal case of the stupid's when they coded this game?

 

[The_EE]

No ideas? Would really like to get this game going, kinda burned out of everything else I own.

I redownloaded the game and reinstalled via comrade or whatever its called, no change.. 0xc000007b error.

Game still installs the ini file etc as a shortcut, its breaking me.

 

[Furiey]

Did you install the game with administrator rights? Not just using an administrator account, but right-clicking on the file and selecting run as administrator?

CivilizationIV.ini and those for BTS are not actually created until the game is run, so if you have not yet sucessfuly started the game you will not have those files created yet. The actual .ini files will be in your MyGames folder for Civ 4.

It does sometimes take a while to get an answer, we're not (contrary to popular opinion) on here 24 hours a day!

Welcome to CFC!

 

[The_EE]

Did you install the game with administrator rights? Not just using an administrator account, but right-clicking on the file and selecting run as administrator?

CivilizationIV.ini and those for BTS are not actually created until the game is run, so if you have not yet sucessfuly started the game you will not have those files created yet. The actual .ini files will be in your MyGames folder for Civ 4.

It does sometimes take a while to get an answer, we're not (contrary to popular opinion) on here 24 hours a day!

Welcome to CFC!

I have tried to install it without rights, with rights, with comrade, without comrade. I have spent over 10 hours now, on here and the net to figure this out. I dont even have a 'my games' folder in my CIV location.

I have double checked to make sure Direct X, video drivers etc are up to date as well. I cant think of anything else to do.

 

[Furiey]

The My Games folder is not in the CIV location, there will be a Civ folder in your My Games folder which will be in the users folder for your user eg: c:\users\The_EE\My Games (Ok, I doubt that that is yoiur account name on your PC but hopefully you get the idea. But if you have not run Civ sucessfully you will not find the .ini file (I'm not sure if you will even find the folder), I have not yet installed any games on this PC and the My Games folder doesn't exist at all yet so I guess it is created by the game.

When you say you have updated your directx did you mean directx 11 or directx9c? If you have not updated directx 9c try that. As you say your drivers are up to date.

Did you try re-registering the .dll?

 

[The_EE]

The My Games folder is not in the CIV location, there will be a Civ folder in your My Games folder which will be in the users folder for your user eg: c:\users\The_EE\My Games (Ok, I doubt that that is yoiur account name on your PC but hopefully you get the idea. But if you have not run Civ sucessfully you will not find the .ini file (I'm not sure if you will even find the folder), I have not yet installed any games on this PC and the My Games folder doesn't exist at all yet so I guess it is created by the game.

When you say you have updated your directx did you mean directx 11 or directx9c? If you have not updated directx 9c try that. As you say your drivers are up to date.

Did you try re-registering the .dll?

I will reinstall directx 9c, I am currently using directx 11 per my DXDiag. and see if that does anything. I tried to re-regester the .dll and it does not allow me to do it, it says,

" The module was loaded but the entry point DllRegisterServer was not found. Make sure "X" is a valud DLL or OCX file and try again.

 

[Furiey]

Directx 9c link for you http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&DisplayLang=en

 

[The_EE]

Wont let me install it, says I am up to date. I guess Directx 11 make sure everything is up to date.

 

[The_EE]

ok, well apparently Win 7 means the lowest version of Directx I can run is 11. hrmmph.

 

[The_EE]

Did a virus check and I am clean.

 

[Furiey]

Just installed the directx9c onto my win 7 box. It installed OK, dx 11 was up to date but I've not installed the game yet so that must have updated it for you.

 

[bwcbwc]

Is there a new Civ 4 patch out? When I bought Civ 4 complete from them a few weeks ago, the current patch version was in the distro.

MSVCRT71.DLL is visual C runtime. You may want to try downloading and installing the complete VC redistributables from Microsoft in case there's another missing file throwing the error.

The MyGames folder is under your User\yourname\Documents folder.

I'm running on Win 7 Pro (also a separate copy of vanilla Civ4 from D2D on Vista) with no glitches like this during the install. Installed using "Run as Administrator" after the installer didn't display properly when just entering the Admin password for UAC. Maybe it's time to uninstall what's out there and start from a clean "Run as Administrator" install. I didn't have to install DX 9.x. The installer took care of downloading components for update.

Not sure how detailed your virus check was, that still sounds like a possibility here if you only ran one scanning product, especially if it was CA or McAfee. My sister got rootkitted over a dialup connection even with McAfee installed. Some good freebies to use as a backup are Microsoft Security Essentials or Malwarebytes Anti-malware...

 

[bwcbwc]

Note that in Win 7 (and Vista) "My Documents" is itself a Shortcut. The real folder is "Documents"...

 

[Furiey]

Just finished installing it myself on Win 7 Home premium x64 and was going to add that the My Games folder was in the My Documents (Documents) folder, not directly in the users\<username> folder. No problems with MSVCRT71.DLL however so it didn't help me solve your problem.

What I did:
Installed Directx9c from the link
Installed Civ 4 (UK, 1 DVD version)
Patched to 1.61
Installed Warlords (UK 1 CD version)
patched warlords to 2.08
Installed BTS (UK 1 DVD version) (which patches Civ 4 to 1.74 and Warlords to 2.03)
Patched to 3.17
Patched to 3.19

All patches and setup programs installed by right-clicking and run as administrator

I did have 2 issues:
The minimun spec warning came up (a very common problem with any processor it doesn't recognise) which reset all graphics to minimum - solved by changing the .ini setting
Invalid voice capture device message (also a common problem) solved by changeing the .ini file to disable voice capture.
The most annoying issue during the install was the time it took to check the directx for the BTS install and updates. This took a very long time (half hour or so) before it decided it was OK, I nearly gave up and did a forced restart but ended up getting dinner instead.

I did not install any of the gamespy or xfire stuff
I did not reboot between installs.
I let it install in the default location

This was the first game installed on this PC, only installed antivurus/firewall and office prior to this. so the machine should be pretty clean. I don't know if there's anything there that is different to what you did or may help.

 

[Furiey]

Is there a new Civ 4 patch out? When I bought Civ 4 complete from them a few weeks ago, the current patch version was in the distro.

The latest patch for BTS is 3.19. The electronic distribution of the game has been a nightmare though with some vendors including patches, others listing them for download and some ignoring the issue. To top it all the patchs are all incompatible! If you've got 3.19 for BTS you're up to date.

 

[The_EE]

Ill try some of your steps Furiey and see how things go.

The game comes downloaded at the most current patch in place, so no patching is needed for straight civ4.

I have not been able to get far enough to validate civ4 to even install the expansions, as I cant get the game to run.

I just installed VC runtime and the SP1. Hopefully installing the game again does something different.

 

[The_EE]

Well, well, well.. I decided to add MSVCR71.DLL and MSVCP71.DLL to the Fraxis folder and I was able to get in far enough to activate the game and start it up.. how long will this last? I dont know.. what I do know is, I have to uninstall the game and put it to a different drive, I really dont want games on my OS drive. At least its easy enough to do again, hopefully.

Thanks Furily, I will report on if I was able to move stuff and get the other 3 add-ons installed shortly

 

[The_EE]

Well, everything seems to have installed fine. Only weird thing is BTS does not seem to have left any sort of shortcut on my desktop lol. Ahh ok, its part of the CIV folder.