I'm coming back to Civilization after being gone over year. I play the basic game on my Mac, but with the release of the updates being so slow on the Mac side, I decided to buy BtS and install it, the basic game and Warlords on my new Mac desktop on the Windows side (yes I had bought both Mac and PC versions of the game, and I use Boot Camp to run Windows on my Mac). While my portable uses XP when booted into Windows, for some reason, I decided to use Vista on the desktop, thinking I might want DX10 capabilities in the future. It took me 3-4 hours but i finally got all the versions up an running. I hope my trials will help others trying to get these games working in Vista.
First I installed the basic game. It does ask to install DirectX 9, I hesitated doing this but it is necessary to run the game as some DirectX 9 files are used even though Vista uses 10. For some reason I decided to get each game running in the latest version before I installed the next. The basic game seemed to work initially but when I updated it to the latest patch it started complaining about a missing DirectX file. (I may have run into this problem only after installing Warlords and updating it. Does Warlords make some changes to the basic game? I'm a bit fuzzy on the order of installation and the problems though). Apparently the latest patch uses an additional file not used in the original game, and that file is not included in the patch. Possibly, if I would have installed BtS, it would have installed the needed file, but I'm not going to uninstall everything to check that. I went to the Microsoft Site, downloaded DirectX 9.0c and installed the full package into Vista.
That seemed to solve the missing file problem but suddenly the game refused to start, complaining about the wrong disk. I uninstalled and reinstalled the game, but that didn't fix the problem. Looking at the properties of the game file, I noticed the XP compatibility box checked. I had checked this when trying to work around the missing file problem. I unchecked this and the game recognized the disk again.
So I recommend the following for Vista users.
1. Install all the game versions before trying to run the basic game or Warlords. If you don't have BtS you will have to download DirectX 9.0c and install it yourself to run the latest patches. (might have to do this anyway)
2. If your game does not recognized your disks, make sure the XP compatibility box is not checked.
With the increased Mac computer sales recently I hope future versions of Civilization are released with both PC and Mac versions much like Blizzard does with its games, but I'm not holding my breath. This whole experience reminded me why I hate going over to the PC (dark
) side.
First I installed the basic game. It does ask to install DirectX 9, I hesitated doing this but it is necessary to run the game as some DirectX 9 files are used even though Vista uses 10. For some reason I decided to get each game running in the latest version before I installed the next. The basic game seemed to work initially but when I updated it to the latest patch it started complaining about a missing DirectX file. (I may have run into this problem only after installing Warlords and updating it. Does Warlords make some changes to the basic game? I'm a bit fuzzy on the order of installation and the problems though). Apparently the latest patch uses an additional file not used in the original game, and that file is not included in the patch. Possibly, if I would have installed BtS, it would have installed the needed file, but I'm not going to uninstall everything to check that. I went to the Microsoft Site, downloaded DirectX 9.0c and installed the full package into Vista.
That seemed to solve the missing file problem but suddenly the game refused to start, complaining about the wrong disk. I uninstalled and reinstalled the game, but that didn't fix the problem. Looking at the properties of the game file, I noticed the XP compatibility box checked. I had checked this when trying to work around the missing file problem. I unchecked this and the game recognized the disk again.
So I recommend the following for Vista users.
1. Install all the game versions before trying to run the basic game or Warlords. If you don't have BtS you will have to download DirectX 9.0c and install it yourself to run the latest patches. (might have to do this anyway)
2. If your game does not recognized your disks, make sure the XP compatibility box is not checked.
With the increased Mac computer sales recently I hope future versions of Civilization are released with both PC and Mac versions much like Blizzard does with its games, but I'm not holding my breath. This whole experience reminded me why I hate going over to the PC (dark
) side.
