I just purchased the Civ 4 bundle (Civ 4 + both xpaks) through Steam. Each of these is shown as a separate program in the Steam “My Games” tab. Which do I launch to play the latest Civ 4? I launched Civ 4 and it loads and says it’s the latest version (v1.74) but I can’t
tell if it knows if the two expansion packs are recognized.
[ul]
[li]A. Which of the 3 do I launch to just play a normal game?[/li][li]B. Should I ever launch the other two programs, possibly to play scenarios that came with that xpak?[/li][/ul]
I don’t know about Steam, but for the non-Steam version you’ll want to launch the Beyond The Sword shortcut if you want the latest version. The regular Civ 4 shortcut doesn’t load up the expansions.
It depends what you mean by the “latest civ.” If you want the latest patched vanilla Civ, launch the core game. If you want the latest and greatest rule additions and changes, launch Beyond the Sword. In both cases you can do a normal game, but using BtS will add stuff that that expansion added (like espionage) as well as what the Warlords expansion added.
Excellent! Thank folks. Here goes round 2 at playing Civ 4 (I bought the DVD version when it first came out but wasn’t thrilled with it for some reason, but only played it briefly).
Oh and I’m pretty sure if you want to play scenarios that came with Warlords you have to launch Warlords. But then again I just bought Civ + BtS so I might be off on this.
Oh and for chrissake, make sure you give the newly “finalized” Fall From Heaven 2 mod a shot. I’ve had more fun with it than both Civ4 and either expansion.
The thing about the Steam versions of the expansion is that you don’t actually need the original installed to play them (although I think you need it in your account). Basically, you only ever need to install and play Beyond the Sword. You might want to launch Warlords to play the scenarios in that. But I’ve had so much to do in Beyond the Sword and Fall from Heaven I haven’t gotten around to that.
Warning: If you play FfH2 and like it as much as most, you may be unable, well, unwilling to be more proper, to play “Vanilla” Civ IV again. At the very least, you’ll be hooked on Civ IV mods :) Wait a bit to play FfH2, until you’ve gotten a bit bored with the base game.
Fall from Heaven 2 is the gateway drug to Civ IV mods.
Are there other good Civ4 mods out there? I played around a bit with the Warhammer one, which seemed decent, but at the time unfinished, and last time I checked it looked like development might have stopped on it. What else can you recommend?
Looks like I was wrong about progress stopping on the Warhammer mod. There’s a new version up with a patch posted by the project lead dated from just two days ago!
Warhammer moved to the FfH codebase a while back (with some of their own tweaks). So they got the benifit of FfH’s spell system and got to take advantage of some of the FfH features which they are using in new and interesting ways.
I’ve got a retail version of Civ4 with the Direct2Drive version of Beyond the Sword and it works fine. However the D2D website specifically says that this will work:
You might look for a similar guarantee somewhere on Steam.
Thanks. I was going to buy it when I saw in the bargain thread that there was a Steam sale, but like everyone else by the time I got anywhere the sale went away.
