Civilization 3
Civilization 3 is available from GoG at http://bit.ly/2r2Gzts. Installing the GoG game is actually quite easy. Just create a new virtual drive, dsound, virtual desktop, select the setup.exe from GoG, let it install, and you’re done.
It was a little bit tricky to find the correct binary to start the game, since “Civ3Launcher. exe” was actually not working, but “Civ3Conquests.exe” worked fine for me. The game is fixed to 1024×768 resolution, so it might not work if you run your desktop at 720p. Apparently, the GoG version is the best you can get. Reading through the topic on WineHQ, it can be rather complicated to get this game to work if you have the CD version of it, and involves NoCD patches, copying files, renaming files, making sure files can not be deleted, and so on. It seems to have some minor issues with the sound, which is a known issue for this game, but disabling and re-enabling the sound effects and music should fix this issue, even if just temporarily.
The game runs really well, and you can really see the improvements over the predecessors as well as what made the successors like Civilization 4 so great. You should really try this game!
Call to Power 2
Speaking of predecessors; Call to Power 2 is a “Civilization like” game, and I want to look into it because of some interesting issues and features.
I have the CD image of this game, and mounting it in cdemu installation is straightforward, although you don’t have the luxury of a pre-made script from PlayOnLinux, but it’s really not needed. Strangely enough, this game does not require dsound installed, but if you install it anyway, it doesn’t harm anything. However, this game requires Microsoft Core Fonts to be installed, and this is where it gets a little tricky. Apparently, the installer of PlayOnLinux for the corefonts is broken, so we need to do it the “old fashioned way”, which means we need to install them via winetricks. To do so, open the configuration menu for the virtual drive, switch to the “Miscellaneous” tab and select “Open a shell”. This will launch a terminal window from within the virtual drive.
The rest is actually quite easy. Just type “winetricks corefonts”, press Enter, wait for the process to finish, then you can close the window. This allows you to start the game. Without the corefonts installed, the game will crash right after the loading screen. All videos are broken at the moment, and I couldn’t find a way to get them to work, but it seems no one has done that yet.
Despite the videos, the game works, even if it’s a little less attractive this way. What makes this game interesting is that you can select nearly any resolution you want and yes, that means you can play this game on 1080p full-screen mode on the ODROID-XU3/XU4.
If that’s the way you want to play it, that’s up to you, and running the game in full-screen mode gives you a little bit more extra performance, which is why you can actually use 1920×1080. I haven’t played this game a lot, so I don’t know how it will perform in later stages with bigger armies and huge maps. The fighting animations were quite nice, and it might be interesting to see how far we can push the XU3/XU4 with this game.
