I haven't played CIV4 in ages and got back into it this week by updating it all and downloading a couple of mods. The first one I played is Rise of Mankind and I am simply blown away. It caters to my long game style, especially with the feeling that you are gradually improving your cities/military etc in a natural evolution rather than the big jumps that I found vanilla CIV4/BTS made.
To put it bluntly I won't be playing CIV4 without Rise of Mankind in the future!
I have got a couple of things to point out which are either observations or problems associated with running the game:
System Spec
Acer Laptop
Intel Core 2 Centrino Dual Core Processor (2 Ghz, 800 Mhz FSB, 4 mb L2 Cache)
Nvidia GeForce 8600M GS with 256 mb
2 Gb DDR2 RAM
Windows Vista and all associated updates
Civilisation 4 w/ BTS patched to 3.17
Rise of Mankind Mod patched to 2.41
Observations
Gap in Sea Transport Evolution
As I was playing the game through I was impressed by the excellent way in which the units all upgrade to represent distinct eras so you never have unrealistic combinations of units to use. However I couldn't help feeling that there was an unrealistic upgrade from Galleon to Transport and perhaps transport came too soon. Perhaps another type of sea transport unit needs to be inserted between them?
Revolutions
I found the number of revolutions (nearly every turn across the game world) to be a little irritating to say the least but I understand you can actually turn this feature off if you wished to?
Tech Advancement
As the game progresses into the later stages I found that tech could be researched too quickly, meaning that you can upgrade units too quickly. For me this means that by the time I have finished planning to go to war, my units have become obsolete already and I never get to use them. Perhaps slow it down a bit more by making them more 'expensive' the later the game gets?
Bugs and Errors
Military Advisor
This only happened to me once but as I was using the Military advisor I clicked Strategic Advantages and I lost the other options across the bottom and no information was filled out. However a save and reboot fixed this issue.
Negative Imagery
If I have been playing for a long time the terrain on screen can sometimes invert to end up looking like a photo negative. I think however this may be just my laptop and a simple save and reboot fixes this.
Crash to Desktops
Civ Add-on Pack
I have tried installing this in 2 different ways and its has not worked either way unfortunately (The 2 ways are 2.4+Civ Pack+2.41 and 2.4+2.41+Civ Pack). The result is the same which is the game crashing when trying to start a new 'Play Now', the CTD occurs in the 1st 1/3 of initialising and I get the same error messages as someone else has mentioned in this thread.
In Game Crash
I have been playing one game for a few days now but I cannot remember how I set it up initially but hopefully you can work it out from the save game file attached to this post. Basically end the turn and shortly after the CTD occurs no matter how differently I have played it up until this turn. The game closes and I get the standard Vista error message. I have tried lowering the graphic settings as I thought maybe because I was quite a way into the game, but this didn't change anything unfortunately.
Final Thought
I hope this information is useful for sorting things out because like I said before this MOD has simply made the game for me. I especially hope we can get the CTD sorted because I really want to go to war in the modern era that is just around the corner in the attached save game!
Kind Regards
Le_Harv