Firaxis, a request please!

[Wiglaf]

That's too easy to defeat - you install the game, phoning home & activating the installation, then make a copy of the disk (using Norton Ghost, Drive Image, True Image - whatever tool of this sort), uninstall phoning home & getting the serial number "back", and finally put the ghost image back on - and voila, there's a working install with a serial number still "unused".

Rinse and repeat on any number of other machines.

you cannot "put the ghost image back on" without going through the install process. which would lock the serial code you got with the game, making the any CD images you burned useless.

of course this system only works if installation requires phoning home.

[Kuciwalker]

you cannot "put the ghost image back on" without going through the install process.

Yes you can. An image is simply an exact copy of the data on the disk. Firaxis can't break ctrl-C ctrl-V in Windows Explorer.

[Wiglaf]

even if you have a CD image illegally burned to a disk you should need to run the install program, right?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
The point of a laptop is to carry as few things around as possible. So even then an external drive is stupid - I don't want to carry around all my different CD's.

Are you saying there is no room in your laptop bag for a slim DVD drive?

[Kuciwalker]

I have a backpack with a built-in laptop holder and two side pockets which fit my wireless mouse and power brick perfectly. I can set up my laptop and put it away (e.g. in class) pretty quickly. Why would I want to carry around all my (relatively fragile, even in CD cases) disks, and have to dig through my backpack whenever I want to change games? I bought the game; lemme play it.

even if you have a CD image illegally burned to a disk you should need to run the install program, right?

Not a CD image, an image of the installed program.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Because they have to deal with ******* pirates. Yeah, its all nice and well to say they'll do it anyway, but why make it easier for them? If you live in a high crime area, does it make any sense to say you are going to be robbed anyway, so just leave your door unlocked at night?

[Wiglaf]

Not a CD image, an image of the installed program.

I see. i'd never heard of that before : /

[player1]

I don't think this is possibile, since it would require patching base Civ4 to work with Warlords disc.
And patching base Civ4 is not gonna happen.

[vondrack]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
I see. i'd never heard of that before : /

To put it 100% correct, it's an image of a logical or physical drive - stores anything and everything that was on a disk at the time of the image creation. Everything as in even the stuff that tells software it has been activated over internet (such an image stores and allows to restore e.g. the Windows activation, too).

If software phones home only during installation/activation (and not every time it's launched), then this is a very simple way of defeating the copy protection mechanism - and hence is seldom used.

I suggest you give these image creation utilities a try. They are very useful for backing up working systems - saving you hours of tiresome reinstallations. I always spend like two weeks installing and fine-tuning my new PC. Then create an image of the 100% functional and working system - and if later anything goes wrong and Windows stop working to my liking, I put this backup image back in - and only need to reinstall whatever has been installed since the last image creation.

Of course there is a catch - you can only create an image of the whole disk. Not individual programs. Plus, not only original files get restored - anything "new" gets deleted, too. You need to play with these tools a bit to get familiar with what they are good at and you need to plan ahead with them (separating program/application from data disks) but I myself find them totally indispensable.