Civ V saves its settings (+ saves etc) to root of c:\

[Waywocket]

Hi folks,

I've just installed Windows 7 and done a clean install of Civ 5, and I'm seeing something weird. Rather than My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\, my settings, logs, saves and so on are being saved directly in to C:\.

I suspect this might be because I have My Documents redirected to a network drive, though every other application I've used works in this configuration, and this setup also worked with Civ 5 on Windows 8 when I was trying the preview, so possibly that's not it.

Has anyone else had this problem?

 

[Waywocket]

Okay, I've made some progress.

It turns out that Civ V is running with elevated permissions, and elevated processes don't see the same drive mappings as standard processes. If I change the redirection of My Documents to the full UNC path rather than the mapped drive letter it works. Of course, there are other programs which don't like UNC paths and are happier using the drive letter.

I think I can get around that using this method:http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/mapped-drives-are-not-seen-from-elevated-command-prompt-in-vista/ - however, I'm surprised that Civ V is able to automatically run elevated without a UAC prompt; this seems like a really bad idea.
Edit: And a cleaner solution that doesn't require changing a global registry setting is to use 'net use' to create a persistent mapping from an elevated command prompt which matches the standard mapping. Still not very happy that the game runs with full administrative privileges without any kind of prompt.