Civilization 4 is my favorite game. In this tutorial, I’ll be going over how to get this masterpiece working in wine on Linux (not necessary for the steam version of the game, you could just use proton).
This tutorial assumes an Arch-based distro, but other distros should be fairly similar——just don’t copy paste my commands, make sure to find the equivalents for your distro.
As it says here, open /etc/pacman.conf and uncomment the following section:
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Obtain a copy of civ4. I personally have a CD copy that had no DRM on it——in other words, I can convert it to a .iso and use that for ease of use on machines without a CD drive. To mount an iso in Linux, use the following command:
mount [path to .iso] [empty folder] -o loop
For those with a CD copy that you’re unable to convert, it should be a fairly similar process except [path to .iso] should be replaced with the path to your CD drive.
Update your package repo at least with sudo pacman -Sy. The Arch Wiki recommends upgrading the system with sudo pacman -Syu before installing new packages.
Wine is a compatibility layer for Linux to allow Windows software to run on it natively. We also want winetricks for the next step. To install this stuff, use the following command:
pacman -S wine winetricks
I personally have the bleeding-edge version of winetricks installed on my machine (probably not necessary), so to install that instead use:
yay -S winetricks-git
If you get a message like bash: yay: command not found, then go here and follow the install instructions, or use a different AUR helper if you prefer. You can also install AUR packages by git cloning the package and running makepkg -si.
It may be easier to just install Civ4 as 32-bit. Set the following environment variable to do this:
export WINEARCH=win32
On recent versions of wine, I didn’t find this step necessary. However, this may be needed for proper game functionality on older wine versions.
For this section, try to find versions of the following packages in your distro’s repository. If they’re not there, try the command:
winetricks msxml3 msxml4 vcrun2003 quartz devenum corefonts lucida tahoma
It takes a while if my memory serves, and you might get some errors mid update. I want to say quartz and devenum failed for me, but I can’t recall. If it does fail, make sure to look for the packages in the repositories or AUR, it should be there.
Run the following command to get sound working on wine. At least one of those sound packages are required, I forget which.
pacman -S lib32-alsa-plugins lib32-libpulse lib32-openal
Hopefully everything should be ready now, just execute the .exe in the .iso we mounted earlier to start the installation, make sure it run it as follows:
wine setup.exe (or whatever the installation .exe is called)
The latest patch should be available for download here if you don’t have it downloaded yet, and you can run that with wine the same way. Civ4 should be installed in the ~/.wine directory just like in Windows when you’ve finished.
The location of my copy of Beyond the Sword is located at ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/2K\ Games/Firaxis\ Games/Sid\ Meier\'s\ Civilization\ 4\ Complete/Beyond\ the\ Sword/Civ4BeyondSword.exe.
And ideally, Civ4 should now be fully functional. Also, a decent amount of credit goes to this link, which I used to help me on the way but it didn’t work 100%, hence me writing this complete guide. This article is more for me than anyone else, but I’d be glad if it worked for someone else too.
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