While trying to get a Civilization 4 pbem (play by e-mail) game going I got really annoyed by the amount of time it takes for the game to startup. Turning off the in-game movies by setting
NoMovies = 1
in CivilizationIV.ini helps a bit though. Haven’t checked what other movies besides the startup once gets disabled by that option, hopefully nothing too interesting.
CivilizationIV.ini can be found in the My Documents\My Games\civ4 folder or something similar.
Update: It would seem the folder under My Games is named after the folder Civilization 4 is installed into.
Also, a large proportion of the user-base have problems with in-game films crashing the game. (I know this myself by civ crashing when I want to beg for mercy).
By turning them off, it’s much more stable.
Anyhow, the game is more stable if you turn the films off.
I must be lucky with civ, since i’ve not experienced most of the bugs people keep writing about. But a patch is on it’s way, so soon we’ll be able to crush each other in order to rule the world.