Getting Civ4 running under Ubuntu Linux

[ainwood]

Former moderator damunzy has written a "how to" for getting Civ4, Warlords and Beyond the Sword (all patched to the latest versions) running on Ubuntu 9.04 using Wine v1.1.25. The thread is located here in the Tech Support forums.

So: For those of you wanting to give Linux a go, but not wanting to lose the ability to play civ, or those of you who already run Ubuntu who need a bit of help getting Civ running, head on over to his thread and give the tutorial a try.

 

[Wright]

Wow, very strange; I've just started trying to do this today and after messing around for a while I come on here and see a front page post about it.

 

[Thorn]

Nice to see!
But this is exactly the kind of thing that has driven me away from Linux. All those steps just to get Civ4 to run? It looks like a guide to compile the SDK!

 

[JohnSearle]

I've heard late game is pretty laggy, and that multiplayer is non-functional. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[unclethrill]

multi-player doesn't work. late game is less laggy than it is in vista on the same computer.

The install really wasn't that hard. The step-by-step really spells out every little detail. The real plus side is that once it is installed, all you have to do is copy the folder from one computer to another or one install to another. You never have to go through the whole install process again.

 

[funkymunky]

The reason installing Civ4 is such a big task is because Linux doesn't have native support for DirectX, Microsoft XML and several other API's that are native to Windows (and taken for granted by the software developers who write for Windows). So you need to install a bunch of those dlls to get the game to work, and you need to make sure that the versions you install are compatible with Civ. I got it working a while back on Intrepid (8.04) after much effort. Wine has progressed a lot in the past 18 months, so I expect it to be easier than it was when I tried it out. I might have to try it again since I upgraded, but just no time right now.

 

[Ran]

I use a similar method to play Civ on my linux machine -- aside from not seeing city progress bars or animated cursors it is faster than when I boot into Windows. MUCH faster than Civ3 on Linux.

It may be because I use the steam version, but if something goes wrong and there is a crash or you shut down, I often can't get Civ4 to run again -- so I have a copy of my .wine directory to instant restore if that happens again. (It's happened to me twice.)

 

[Bratmon]

Just a reminder: the guide is still a work in progress.