I am quit sure that there are people out there that have already done this but for those who might be interested here is a short guide, ramble, story (whatever you want to call it) on how to speed up CIV IV A LOT 
. At least it does so in my experience. At least loading is crazy fast. Note I am only trying to share information with people that wish to speed up their game significantly IF and only IF they have the unutilized resources available. Do this at your own risk, although I really fail to see what could go wrong .
Before you start reading I want to point out that this modification is only really viable for people with at least 6 GB of ram (you might think WOW, thats a lot of ram but it sure is worth it).
Want to know the steps, skip this section.
I have the theory that CIV IV in its nobility loads only limited amount of information from the hard drive in order to minimize its impact on the system resources. I suppose this would work wonderfully in its vanilla flavor as the information required from the hard drive (in late games) is presumably relatively small. When you add mods with lots and lots of custom and beautiful artwork and texture then CIV seems to run into trouble with its data seeking methods and it ultimately gets some sort of overflow error and we get some crashes and burning going on. Some researching led me to this decade old trick\solution.
For those who like reading just keep reading or skip to the instructions .
Topic: Ramdisk.
What is ramdisk? Ramdisk is a portion of memory that windows treats as hard drive. Be advised that this fake hard drive is actively occupying a part of your memory. That is why I suggest that people have at least 6 GB of memory. If I make a ramdisk of 4GB in size (which we will) then you only have 2 GB left of usable memory, which is STILL acceptable (but not great). More memory is always better.
Why is ramdisk a potential solution? If the game files are loaded into ramdisk prior to game launch you will effectively neutralize the speed of your hard drive as a performance factor when playing CIV IV (see my previous ramble). YES memory is UP TO x1000 times faster than your average hard drive. If I remember correctly it is like 25 times faster for sequential reading and 1100 times faster for random 4kb writes.
Why have I not (maybe) heard of this before!?! Well ramdisk has a catch. All data on ramdisk (just like in memory) is lost upon any kind of reboot or shutdown of the computer.
WHAT!!! ARE U MAD!!! No no its alright. The game is safe in its initial installation directory and all saves are made into the documents folder on the computer. No crucial files are lost. However time must be invested into copying the game folder to the drive prior to game launch but the gain is worth that extra time.
That smells fishy! Do I need to modify registry. I dont like modifying registry! No worries, the game runs perfectly no matter where it is located. You only need to copy the folders once (per restart).
Ok, so how do we do it?
1. Begin by watching this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrecoX2nsOM
The guy is not very fast but he gives thorough enough explanation on how to get ramdisk going. DONT worry is quit straight forward and painless. He does talk a bit about page file also, i suppose it dosn't hurt to turn it off. You can stopp watching at minute 12. Oh and since this ramdisk program limits our use to 4GB we must be smart in our space management. Dont put your page file system on your ramdisk; leave it blank as we\you might use most of the space. And for the people who are interested, putting page file on ramdisk (a.k.a. memory) doesnt ideologically make sense at first, but in reality its actually quit smart.
2. Next I recommend making a special copy of your CIV folder and put it into an easy location. Strip this copy of ALL its mods. Even take all the mods from vanilla CIV and the warlord expansion. Remember that you can always access those modes in the original game. This should put the game size (with both expansion packs and patch 3.19) to about ~2.6gb. Next pick your favorite modes and put them in another Independent folder (its better if you dont place them in the "stripped" game folder because you want to access them easily and you most likely only want one mod to be placed on the hard drive when you do copy it)[was that a run on sentence
]. FFH 2 is about 900 MB so together they are ~3.5gb, just below the 4 GB limit.
3. When ready copy the stripped game (from your easy folder) to the root of the ramdisk.
4. Next pick your mod and put it into its respective/appropriate location on the ramdisk. A.k.a F:\ Sid Meier's Civilization IV\Beyond the sword\mods
5. Launch game (from ramdisk) and be AMAZED by your newly acquired speed and blazing fast loading time.
I actually just tested some old save games from FFH 2 and rise of mankind and both worked very smooth and fast. But I really dont have time to test this fully. Running on Windows 7 x64 with way too much ram and "only" 2.66
Ghz i7 920. I hear fast processors seem to help
/*******************************************************************/
For the geeks or the lazy people. This batch file automatically loads the game files into the ramdisk for you and then launches the game.
1. Read the following code, it might look intimidating but its not very bad, the only section that you need to worry about is the xcopy. You will need to modify the path to reflect the correct game folders.
Oh and one tiny detail, I am not an expert on batch file programming but if you want to copy your "Fall from heaven II" folder then you need to put it into another folder called "fall" or something. Does that make sense. If you xcopy "Fall from heaven II" directly it will only copy the contents NOT the whole folder and you need the folder name to be there so Civ can handle it properly. Don't worry this is the only ******ed step you have to do
(remember to do it for both the "stripped" game folder and all mods you think you are going to use). Oh and xcopy works like this: xcopy /E "target folder" "destination folder". /E stands for copy everything... Bleh just experiment
.
Make a text file and copy paste this into it. (this is really just a sample code, but it contains everything that you will ever need)
echo off
cls
COLOR 02
echo **********************************
echo Welcome
echo **********************************
echo.
echo This program will copy civ iv to the ramdisk.
echo Which mode do you want to run.
echo.
echo 1-Fall2 2-Rise 3-Exit
echo.
set /p mod=[1,2,3]?
if "%mod%"=="1" goto Fall2
if "%mod%"=="2" goto Rise
else goto EXIT
:Fall2
xcopy /E E:\backup\civ F:\
xcopy /E E:\backup\mods\fall F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Mods"
F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4"\"Beyond the Sword"\Civ4BeyondSword.exe mod=\Fall from Heaven 2"
Goto EXIT
:Rise
xcopy /E E:\backup\civ F:\
xcopy /E E:\backup\mods\rise F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Mods"
F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4"\"Beyond the Sword"\Civ4BeyondSword.exe mod=\Rise of Mankind"
Goto EXIT
:EXIT
echo bye
pause
Then save it as CivRamdisk.bat <- notice the .bat extension, very important. Just save it as "all files" and not as text files and you will be fine.
Next you run this batch file and wholla all done for you, it even gives you options between two different mods. Couldn't be easier.
Don't worry about the batch file, it dosn't look pretty when the copying starts
Well there you go. I did try to eliminate spelling and making this clear ( and maybe redundant), but i can only catch so many errors when reading it for the 20th time
cheers and enjoy -
. At least it does so in my experience. At least loading is crazy fast. Note I am only trying to share information with people that wish to speed up their game significantly IF and only IF they have the unutilized resources available. Do this at your own risk, although I really fail to see what could go wrong .Before you start reading I want to point out that this modification is only really viable for people with at least 6 GB of ram (you might think WOW, thats a lot of ram but it sure is worth it
). Want to know the steps, skip this section.
I have the theory that CIV IV in its nobility loads only limited amount of information from the hard drive in order to minimize its impact on the system resources. I suppose this would work wonderfully in its vanilla flavor as the information required from the hard drive (in late games) is presumably relatively small. When you add mods with lots and lots of custom and beautiful artwork and texture then CIV seems to run into trouble with its data seeking methods and it ultimately gets some sort of overflow error and we get some crashes and burning going on. Some researching led me to this decade old trick\solution.
For those who like reading just keep reading or skip to the instructions .
Topic: Ramdisk.
What is ramdisk? Ramdisk is a portion of memory that windows treats as hard drive. Be advised that this fake hard drive is actively occupying a part of your memory. That is why I suggest that people have at least 6 GB of memory. If I make a ramdisk of 4GB in size (which we will) then you only have 2 GB left of usable memory, which is STILL acceptable (but not great). More memory is always better
.Why is ramdisk a potential solution? If the game files are loaded into ramdisk prior to game launch you will effectively neutralize the speed of your hard drive as a performance factor when playing CIV IV (see my previous ramble). YES memory is UP TO x1000 times faster than your average hard drive
. If I remember correctly it is like 25 times faster for sequential reading and 1100 times faster for random 4kb writes.Why have I not (maybe) heard of this before!?! Well ramdisk has a catch. All data on ramdisk (just like in memory) is lost upon any kind of reboot or shutdown of the computer.
WHAT!!! ARE U MAD!!! No no its alright. The game is safe in its initial installation directory and all saves are made into the documents folder on the computer. No crucial files are lost. However time must be invested into copying the game folder to the drive prior to game launch but the gain is worth that extra time.
That smells fishy! Do I need to modify registry. I dont like modifying registry! No worries, the game runs perfectly no matter where it is located. You only need to copy the folders once (per restart).
Ok, so how do we do it?
1. Begin by watching this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrecoX2nsOM
The guy is not very fast but he gives thorough enough explanation on how to get ramdisk going. DONT worry is quit straight forward and painless. He does talk a bit about page file also, i suppose it dosn't hurt to turn it off. You can stopp watching at minute 12. Oh and since this ramdisk program limits our use to 4GB we must be smart in our space management. Dont put your page file system on your ramdisk; leave it blank as we\you might use most of the space. And for the people who are interested, putting page file on ramdisk (a.k.a. memory) doesnt ideologically make sense at first, but in reality its actually quit smart.
2. Next I recommend making a special copy of your CIV folder and put it into an easy location. Strip this copy of ALL its mods. Even take all the mods from vanilla CIV and the warlord expansion. Remember that you can always access those modes in the original game. This should put the game size (with both expansion packs and patch 3.19) to about ~2.6gb. Next pick your favorite modes and put them in another Independent folder (its better if you dont place them in the "stripped" game folder because you want to access them easily and you most likely only want one mod to be placed on the hard drive when you do copy it)[was that a run on sentence
]. FFH 2 is about 900 MB so together they are ~3.5gb, just below the 4 GB limit.3. When ready copy the stripped game (from your easy folder) to the root of the ramdisk.
4. Next pick your mod and put it into its respective/appropriate location on the ramdisk. A.k.a F:\ Sid Meier's Civilization IV\Beyond the sword\mods
5. Launch game (from ramdisk) and be AMAZED by your newly acquired speed and blazing fast loading time.
I actually just tested some old save games from FFH 2 and rise of mankind and both worked very smooth and fast. But I really dont have time to test this fully. Running on Windows 7 x64 with way too much ram and "only" 2.66
Ghz i7 920. I hear fast processors seem to help/*******************************************************************/
For the geeks or the lazy people. This batch file automatically loads the game files into the ramdisk for you
and then launches the game.1. Read the following code, it might look intimidating but its not very bad, the only section that you need to worry about is the xcopy. You will need to modify the path to reflect the correct game folders.
Oh and one tiny detail, I am not an expert on batch file programming but if you want to copy your "Fall from heaven II" folder then you need to put it into another folder called "fall" or something. Does that make sense. If you xcopy "Fall from heaven II" directly it will only copy the contents NOT the whole folder and you need the folder name to be there so Civ can handle it properly. Don't worry this is the only ******ed step you have to do
(remember to do it for both the "stripped" game folder and all mods you think you are going to use). Oh and xcopy works like this: xcopy /E "target folder" "destination folder". /E stands for copy everything... Bleh just experiment.Make a text file and copy paste this into it. (this is really just a sample code, but it contains everything that you will ever need)
echo off
cls
COLOR 02
echo **********************************
echo Welcome
echo **********************************
echo.
echo This program will copy civ iv to the ramdisk.
echo Which mode do you want to run.
echo.
echo 1-Fall2 2-Rise 3-Exit
echo.
set /p mod=[1,2,3]?
if "%mod%"=="1" goto Fall2
if "%mod%"=="2" goto Rise
else goto EXIT
:Fall2
xcopy /E E:\backup\civ F:\
xcopy /E E:\backup\mods\fall F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Mods"
F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4"\"Beyond the Sword"\Civ4BeyondSword.exe mod=\Fall from Heaven 2"
Goto EXIT
:Rise
xcopy /E E:\backup\civ F:\
xcopy /E E:\backup\mods\rise F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Mods"
F:\"Sid Meier's Civilization 4"\"Beyond the Sword"\Civ4BeyondSword.exe mod=\Rise of Mankind"
Goto EXIT
:EXIT
echo bye
pause
Then save it as CivRamdisk.bat <- notice the .bat extension, very important. Just save it as "all files" and not as text files and you will be fine.
Next you run this batch file and wholla all done for you, it even gives you options between two different mods
. Couldn't be easier.Don't worry about the batch file, it dosn't look pretty when the copying starts
Well there you go. I did try to eliminate spelling and making this clear ( and maybe redundant), but i can only catch so many errors when reading it for the 20th time
cheers and enjoy -
storage and saving you some time in setup, BUT even with the fastest SSD out there (the one that cost a lot of $$$ 
. But I still got this annoyingly long turn times on a "small" scenario map
. I think it has somehting to do with the computer moving 200 units individually as opposed in one large stack..... maybe someone smart can shed some light on this, but I guess a sandy bridge 4.8 Ghz can alleviate this sillyness 
