Civ4 has a lot of serious issues out of the box, even on monster gaming rigs. It is, literally, disk cancer. But, there is hope.
If you go "Beta" (play like the Beta players), you'll find a very fine game. The way you play like a beta tester is to strip out all the wonder movies (there is no way in the UI to disable the playing of wonder movies, so you have to delete the darn thing from your HD currently if you truly want to copy the "hundreds" of beta testers out there that have working Civ4 set ups), and disable music. Then, its a good game. Until then, the game thrashes like mad, and crashes due to poor resource sharing and poor memory allocation code (the normal state for Firaxian code). It's sad, but true.
Saving the game until November would not help this. This has both problems with reproduction as well as innate code issues..
The biggest problem is that of the actual physical product. There's some seriously messed up CD/DVD media out there. It's on the order of 1 out of 10 to as high as 1 out of 5. Then there's the other associated manufacturing issues (bad manuals, bad tech posters, etc). Extremely high incidence rate.
Then there's the fact that there wasn't a real broad group of hardware in the 2 year+ beta group. Whoops. Well, there was (older EQ). Those work because they made it work so they could be in the group, but didn't bother checking newer versions afterward. Not checking on major hardware standards is classic Firaxis.
The third problem is the emergent disk cancer behavior due to the game code. The game literally CTDs while writing to the hard drive, and does so often. The reason it CTDs is very bad resource and memory handling coding. The in-game music player and the video/display layer compete for exclusive access to the hard drive. If the wrong one fails, you end up with a null slice of resource that is then used. The computer scientist types out there will tell you that's a CTD. The disc write comes in from all the temp files Civ4's overally ambitious graphical engine causes. The work around is to simply turn off the in-game music (and not use the in game music player to play your other mp3s). This drops the in-game dueling for resources to none at least until the wonder movies pop up while the game is trying to do a jump to cit from wherever the display is at the time (that's a GRAPHIC event that causes disk writes while the display needs exclusive access to the hard disk to look up the bitmaps to put on the screen). Yep. Every time you play a movie, you risk another disk cancer hit. I would advise early Civ4 adopters to get the best disk cancer fighter known, Diskeeper (the only available NT File System defragger). You'll need it.
Just to add insult to injury, the game itself has numerous memory and resource leaks. And it's Bink movie player leaks memory as well.
Firaxis has promised to clean up its code. So in a few patches, it should do a lot better. They are looking into all their major issues (which, they knew about, but it wasn't important enough to fix in beta or for the cut going out for the 2005 christmas season... typical Firaxis).
As for the game itself. When it works, it's a great little thing. But it is loaded with bad code that will force you to start a new game, often when you are only 4 turns away from finishing the game. Because the AI has done something that corrupts the game, and it did it some 100 turns ago, but you didn't know it back then. And going back 100 turns in Civ4 is like, 4 to 8 hours man.
Once the Firaxis developers clean this game up, stop the disk cancer behavior, fix the resource and memory leaks, and get around to fixing all the AI killing your game issues, oh, and fix the CTD on any win issue, then you'll get a game.
Frankly, Civ4 needed another year in a real beta/QA environment. The basic game itself is very good, but the code... Well, now that it is out, they can finally go back and fix it. Hurray.
If you haven't ran out and bought Civ4 yet... don't. Wait until at least patch 2. That's the suggested advice from Trip and Soren (the Firaxian programmers!). Patch 1 itself is focused not on the CTDs and game killers... its focused on getting the code to run on the hardware that Firaxis said it would run on.
I don't blame Take Two for the state of the code. They can only take the hit for finding the cheapest possible manufacturing for making the packages. That's all Hot Coffee fall out... costing them more money in returned products.
In time, all this initial trouble with Civ4 will pass. What will be remain will be a solid Civ sequel (if they don't nerf anything while tightening up their code). The majority of people are going to like it. But right now, it's a very thorny thing, easily upset, easily distracted, and subject to throwing temper tantrums.
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Its so good itll take away from Beta 4 time for me