Jesus Civs said:
Which is it? A bad disc or a bad PC?
Seems like both.
Replacement disc did install but computer wasn't up fot it?
Umm, maybe your reading comprehension is a bit 3rd grade. The OP specifically stated that she could not get it to install on her machine, however, even if she had gotten it to install she has noted several technical issues from other users in this forum that may prevent her from enjoying the game. Why don't you stop being a griefer and let the grown-ups talk?
***Jesus Civs placed on ignore***
I would like to make a few additional comments about my own experience installing Civ4. I have 5 computers set up on a LAN at home, one for myself, my wife, each of our 2 children, and my nephew (who also lives with us), I built all of the computers except my nephews (we are both computer techs). I purchased Civ4 shortly after the first patch came out, and my nephew was the first to attempt to install the game. His system is a 2.8ghz AMD with 1gb RAM and a 256mb ATI card (not sure which model). He had problems relating to his ATI drivers and DirectX, and had to reinstall twice (including video drivers and DirectX) before he could get the game to work properly. My system is the same processor and RAM, with a different MoBo and an older ATI card (Radeon 9000 pro). I had no problems installing the game on my computer, and thought this might be because I had reformatted and reinstalled my O/S just a few days beforehand (I tend to blow out my O/S about once a year).
This turned out to be a false assumption on my part, as I also had no problem installing on our other 3 computers, none of which had been reformatted recently. Those 3 machines are all slower (1.3ghz, 1.8ghz, and 2.0ghz AMD), and have less ram, but they all run similar ATI Radeon cards (2 have Radeon 9000 pro, one has a Radeon 8500). One thing about ATI cards, the drivers they release for their new cards are always craptacular, and it quite often takes some time for them to release decent drivers in my experience. So the problems some are experience may have less to do with the game design and Q&A than they do with video drivers. It would seem, however, that Kayigo may actually have run into an issue with a bad run of disks. I don't recall if she specified the error she was having, or at what point the error occured, but since she is less interested in a fix than a refund at this point, I don't know that it really matters.
On to some of the issues that have been raised by our friends overseas. I have seen some posts in this thread from those in Europe and Australia about manufacturing standards, and the culpability of the publisher in insuring that the game works or providing if refund if it doesn't. I would encourage these people to research the technology that allows them to use the Free Market civic, as that is what we have here in the US. A Free Market economy is based on the concept of Caveat Emptor, or "let the buyer beware". The concept in a nutshell is that in a Free Market, unscrupulous sellers will be revealed and shunned by buyers, and will eventually be left with no customers, so the system is self-correcting.
Of course we do not have a strict Free Market, commerce is regulated in many areas, however, there must be substantial evidence of an attempt to defraud the customer before any government agency will get involved. I think that, given the fact that the majority of users here have had little or no problem installing and playing the game, it shows that the intent of Firaxis and their publisher was not to defraud their customers.
Now the game may have been released by the publisher before Firaxis wanted them to release it, but this is more and more common in the PC game market these days. From the perspective of most publishers, the game must be on the shelves well ahead of the Xmas buying season to maximize profits, and for the publisher (not the developer) profits are all that matters. If the game is delayed a month, it might as well be delayed a year, the profit margin will likely shrink just as much either way. Regardless of whether the game was rushed to market, though, it was playable out of the box for the vast majority of users. I am not defending this practice by any means, but I am attempting to tell it the way it is. I have been burned more than once by a game that was rushed to market, and never really patched to the point that it was enjoyable. I also do not like the other result of this type of activity by publishers, that being that there are very few good games released during the summer.
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