Installing Civ 4 on Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10 / 11 (32-/64-bit)

I can't even get past the installshield, so I haven't gotten to a point where I could direct to where the game would be installed.
 
which version have you got? The original vanilla / warlords / bts trinity, or is it a "complete edition"?
 
fwiw,

new win7 ultimate x64 installation, fully updated. I did not do any "run as administrator" stuff. I popped in the civ4 complete dvd and let the auto-run setup start. The civ 4 complete install defaulted to "c:\program files x86" and i let it install there (no special folder needed).

I manually installed BTS 3.19 patch, blue marble, BUG4.4 and my mod. no issues.

The only special thing about my win7 installation is a MS hotfix i downloaded to fix an offline files issue, KB244467, I DO NOT think this helped, but who knows.

this is on a DELL inspiron 1520 w/ SSD.

I do have one question, the ci4 complete install pretty much only gives the choice to install colonization or not. Any way to ONLY install BTS?
 
BTS uses Assets from both the base game and Warlords, and expands those games with new content. The complete edition installs all 3 of them for you, but the structure stays the same:

$civ4\Assets
$civ4\Warlors\Assets
$civ4\BTS\BTS.exe
$civ4\BTS\Assets\

When you run the BTS exe it uses Files from all 3 Assets folders. In BTS\Assets is stored only the stuff which was added in BTS, e.g. new leaderheads. Stuff which stayed the same in the transition from vanilla->warlords->bts is just pulled from the other two Asset folders.

This means that you can't just only install the latest expansion, BTS folder alone doesn't contain all the stuff that is needed.
 
The BTS installer has most of the files from Warlords included, and installs them if need be. There is some overlap there. Thankfully firaxis was nice enough to set it up that way so you didn't have to buy Warlords in order to play BTS.

/edit: but, just to be clear, if you look in the install dir, you will find the Warlords Assets in the same place that the Warlords installer would have put them. Excluding the WL executables, python Scripts (i think) and Scenarios. But those things take up relatively little disk space.
 
BTS uses Assets from both the base game and Warlords, and expands those games with new content. The complete edition installs all 3 of them for you, but the structure stays the same:

$civ4\Assets
$civ4\Warlors\Assets
$civ4\BTS\BTS.exe
$civ4\BTS\Assets\

When you run the BTS exe it uses Files from all 3 Assets folders. In BTS\Assets is stored only the stuff which was added in BTS, e.g. new leaderheads. Stuff which stayed the same in the transition from vanilla->warlords->bts is just pulled from the other two Asset folders.

This means that you can't just only install the latest expansion, BTS folder alone doesn't contain all the stuff that is needed.

thanks for the reply...this makes sense. :)
 
fwiw,

new win7 ultimate x64 installation, fully updated. I did not do any "run as administrator" stuff. I popped in the civ4 complete dvd and let the auto-run setup start. The civ 4 complete install defaulted to "c:\program files x86" and i let it install there (no special folder needed).

I manually installed BTS 3.19 patch, blue marble, BUG4.4 and my mod. no issues.

The only special thing about my win7 installation is a MS hotfix i downloaded to fix an offline files issue, KB244467, I DO NOT think this helped, but who knows.

this is on a DELL inspiron 1520 w/ SSD.

I do have one question, the ci4 complete install pretty much only gives the choice to install colonization or not. Any way to ONLY install BTS?

Had a similar experience with Civ 4 Complete on Win 7 Pro 64-Bit logged in with an admin account.

Here are the steps I took to get the game patched and running MODs via desktop shortut:

1. Installed Civ4 Complete without running as admin - chose express install
2. After install of both Civ4 and Colonization, there was a Civ4 Complete shortcut on the desktop.
3. Clicked shortcut and selected Run as Administrator
4. Selected Check for Updates from Advanced Menu
5. After auto-downloading 3.19 patch, clicked ok to install update (this is where it previously would not work and just dump to desktop because I was not running the game as admin)
6. Click through patch process, selecting language and default install and license agreement.

This then successfully patched from Civ 4 complete DVD to 3.19

Note that the default desktop shortcut does not allow the advanced properties to select Always Run as Admin. To get around this, I deleted that shortcut and then browsed to my install destination - then to Civ4 BotS director and then selected Civ4BeyondtheSword.exe, right clicked and send to desktop as a shortcut. I was then able to select that shortcut advanced properties and set Always Run as Admin.

To create shortcuts for my favorite mods, I then copied the new desktop shortcut and added the correct "mod=\" properties to the Target:

Hope this helps!
 
installation on drive F:/civ4 (not in default C:/... ), do all as administrator: intallation, patches, start. Removed all "write only" flags from files/folders, changed all ownerships of "Trusted Installer" to "System Administrator" (that's me)

it works on win7/64 w/o problems, except when I run AND on big map, then it crashes somewhere above turn 720 (application crash object DLL, and same is on both: XP and Win7/64)
With ROM w/o revolutions it is fine, ROM with revolutions also crashes.
Vanilla with big map is fine

So the crashes are not a CIV thing, but a Mod thing of AND, res.p of Revolutions.

But it is slow, does use one CPU only, 2 cores, with just 25% total cpu load (50% one). Althought multi-processor/multi-core CPUs already exist when the game come out. If you have a cpu with Interl boost technology, it runs nearby always in boost mode, because it uses 2 cores only. But it gives littel only.

The difference in speed between XP and Win7/64 is caused by better video card and faster hdd only, as civ4 reads from hdd very often. It needs less than 1.7 GB Ram (plus video) so it is not different to XP running with 3G Ram limit set.
 
I just installed vanilla on a new Windows 7 machine and it went without a hitch. Thanks for the advice. The only oddity is when starting a game I get an error message about an invalid voice capture device that I have to dismiss several times. I am assuming this is because I don't have a microphone connected.
 
I get the same error not sure how to solved that. I have tried a number of things.
 
Hey, I'm having problems with running mods on my windows 7. I download mods for BtS off the website, and I unzip them into my mods folder, but when I try to run it it only shows the loading screen and does nothing else. Ideas?
 
Did you install as per my process on the start of this thread ?
 
I found this after I installed everything haha. So I should reinstall my games the way you described?
 
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