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.