Note: This was originally written in August of 2007. I haven’t verified this in ages to make sure these instructions still work. I am restoring this article mostly due to kind words from someone. Reader beware.

This is actually a Civ IV mod, Fall from Heaven 2. I'm cheating. =)

It's tradition that the brilliant Civilization series have so-so to crappy multiplayer implementations. It came as a shock then that Civilization IV was not just one of the best games of all time, but was one of the best multiplayer games of all time as well.

The secret to making it work is some software called the "Pitboss." Running on one machine, this lets you log into a persistent server and play. So far, not very special.

Where it becomes special is that, if all of your players are online, you play in real-time. Otherwise, you simply take a turn and logout when you please. It makes online games that stretch days or weeks an absolute breeze, removing the pain that was play by email.

However, the Pitboss requires Civilization IV to run, which means it requires DirectX and about 1.5 GB of disk space. For a dedicated server on Windows Server 2003, this wasn't going to fly.

So, thus began my hacking to arrive at the minimum installation required to run Pitboss.

How to Do It

Super-briefly, here's how its done. Reasons why will follow:

  1. On a machine with Civ4 installed, make a copy of your Civ4 directory.
  2. Delete the proper files from your Civ4 Root directory and Assets directory so that they resemble those shown below. (d3dx9_XX.dll will come from your c:\windows\system32 directory)

    The CivIV Directory The Assets sub-directory
    Your CivIV Directory Your Assets Subdirectory

  3. Copy to the server and enjoy! No registry hacks / DirectX install needed, and you've just reduced ~1.5GB and some change to about 200 MB (310 MB or so with Warlords installed)

 

The Fine Print

A few points on this approach:

  • You'll notice when you launch Pitboss that it generates a few errors in its console window. It doesn't seem to affect anything in its performance.
  • If you want to play it safe, include all of the "AssetsX.fpk" files in your Assets directory. I'd hazard a guess that future updates will require resources from those excluded.
  • For your Warlords subdirectory, you can follow the same approach. (I'd also assume it works the same for Beyond the Sword, but I haven’t tested that.)
  • Despite the fact that the Pitboss doesn't display anything graphically, the Shaders subdirectory does seem to be required. Civ appears to use the shaders to do version detection when connecting to multiplayer games. Why that is, I couldn't say.

That's about all there is to it though. If you run this on a dedicated Win 2003 server, you'll probably want to run it from the Console so that you don't have to remain logged in permanently. If you're accessing your machine remotely, that can be done by going to Start -> Run and typing in "mstsc -console" without the quotes.

Let me know if you run into problems.
-Scott