Please Help

[Miklo]

I just bought Civ4, got it all installed and when i tried to start the game i got a message that said the program can't start because MSVCR71.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

I reinstalled 3 times now, and its still saying the same thing. I am completely computer dumb so any help would be appriciated. Also im running windows 7 if that makes a diffrence. Thanks.

[Baldyr]

This is exactly the kind of thing that will keep me from switching from XP for years and years still... And if Civ5 will require another OS, I'll still wait a good number of years before upgrading my OS and my game. Anyone remember the nightmare that was the release of Civ4? I had problems getting the game to run on a PC I bought the year before last, and by that time all known issues should have already been fixed.

I'm sorry that your PCs got a virus. Windows 7, that is.

[brandonjm8]

first off uninstall civ4 then reboot computer then turn off all anti-virus programs and firewalls, now reinstall and then update prior to playing, come here for the latest patches, for civ4 vanilla its 1.61 i believe and bts its 3.19, if you search these forums you will find links to get the updated patches. i could install the game but not the patch with my computer security up and running, had to disable all protection whilst installing, hope that works for you.

once you install it, make sure to give it permission within your firewall.

[Baldyr]

I myself had an issue with my current PC, where the game wouldn't install. (Still XP.) I had to remove everything manually from the registry, then reintall both expansions in sequence, then patch. Thankfully it did work in the end, but it got me worried there for a moment.

Also, I had some kind of issue with Civ4 and the motherboard on my brand new PC (back when I bought it). It wouldn't run Civ4 proper, the CPU got the fritz and everything would just stall. In the end I had to switch motherboards and do a new installation of everything. (I had already switched graphics cards, for nothing, basically.) I do believe Civ4 also installed on the first try, in the end. And nowadays I really don't get any crashes or anything.

By the say, my fiancée has a brand new computer and her Windows Explorer (XP) is just bonkers. There seems to be nothing that can be done about it, it just keeps updating every window with no reason at all. These things drive me crazy.

[Miklo]

Thanks bro ill give this a try and see what i come up with.

[brandonjm8]

Thanks bro ill give this a try and see what i come up with.

tell us if it works or doesnt, if it doesnt theres a email addy in the civ4 manual for fireaxis, email them for further help if this doesnt help, goodluck.

[ybrevo]

And next time - of course buy an iMac G5 with Mac OS X Snowleopard. BtS runs like a dream - even with the music on

(And no - I don´t sell the product for a living )

Happy New Year everyone - and thanks for the help you gave me in 2009 here on Apolyton.

ybrevo

[Calvin Vu]

My best technical support service these days (or even my doctor's office number) is Google .
It seems you have an old version of Microsoft .NET framework (applicable only to Windows XP but not Windows 7) installed on your system. You need to download and install the appropriate version from the Microsoft website.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/kb00827073.aspx

[Miklo]

No Brandon that didnt work. Thanks for the help tho. Ill go and try what you said Calvin see if that helps. Thanks everyone for the help.

[Norselord]

I had this very problem on Friday, when my Windows crashed all the way down to nuthin, forcing a complete reinstall of windows and the obligatory reinstall of Civ4 and BTS.

The solution is to:
1) go to a site (www.dll-files.com) and download the MSVCR71.dll file.
2) install this file in your c:/windows/system32/i386 folder.
3) try to run the program again
4) you will now see that another .dll file is needed. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary.
5) You may now get an error that your bink32.dll is faulty.
6) reinstall the bink32.dll file.

Make sure that Civ4 and expansions are loaded onto your primary partition. For some reason you can elect to install Civ4 on any partition you like, but the expansions all have to go on the primary partition (direct2drive version, at least.)

I had to fiddle with this thing for about 3 hours, installing and uninstalling and reinstalling the program and also updating each .dll file. However, the program now runs well under windows7 and has not crashed due to the "memory leak" issue that used to cut the game off.

[Calvin Vu]

I think you're right. I can't believe that Microsoft released a new OS without shipping all the public .dll files needed by older applications so I gave them the benefit of the doubt of having some mismatched configuration on the system. But it's likely that they did what I thought were the unthinkable.
I'm in a similar kind of work (but on a Unix based platform) and our motto is "An executable lives forever". Well, maybe not really "forever" but if you have a program compiled some 20 years ago, then over 95% of the time it will still work with the lastest release of the operating system and accompanying runtime library support. Any decommissioning of those public interfaces will have a 5-year End-of-Life warnings.

Given the cavalier attitude of yanking those .dll out of the latest Windows release, there's no guarantee that just putting those .dll back will work correctly since they might have some internal interfaces with the operating system which have been changed unless there are new .dll for those libraries specifically recompiled/tested to ensure they work with Windows 7.

[Brael]

This is exactly the kind of thing that will keep me from switching from XP for years and years still... And if Civ5 will require another OS, I'll still wait a good number of years before upgrading my OS and my game. Anyone remember the nightmare that was the release of Civ4? I had problems getting the game to run on a PC I bought the year before last, and by that time all known issues should have already been fixed.

I'm sorry that your PCs got a virus. Windows 7, that is.

The nightmare with civ 4 was because they shipped the game needing a certain file to run, but the file wasn't included in the install. A fix was put out, but that was still a mess. Anyways, I'm sure that if you got a new computer today (a good/great one, not a $300 walmart computer), assuming that civ 5 comes out before 2015 or so it would be able to run it without issues, though maybe not at the highest settings. Civ4 takes more hardware than a lot of non gamers have in their computers, but it doesn't require anything remotely close to what other games take.

While there could be hardware issues with a civ 5 when it comes out, I don't think they'll be memory or video card related. Despite how much people disliked Vista, it did one great thing for the industry... it got more ram and better video cards into the computers of people that aren't hardcore gamers. That means the hardware issues civ4 had are unlikely to be repeated (hopefully).

[Ming]

I hope you're right. I seem to end up buying a new computer every time a new version of civ comes out. My last one was for Civ IV... I'm sure I'll be buying a new one when Civ 5 comes out

[ybrevo]

Ming

And if you buy a Mac computer, you can wait for another 5 years before CIV 5 gets there

It took an eternity to get BtS for Mac, but now I see it was worth waiting for. After switching to Intel, the Macs has done wonders to CIV. I have never seen a better game for this platform.

But I hope they will release CIV 5 for both at the same time. If not - I will return to the camels of CIV 2

ybrevo

[wodan11]

Civ3 was the reason I bought a PC for myself when it came out, even though I still had a perfectly good Mac. Game playing in general is one of the reasons to get a PC.