Well, this is just great. I ran to the mall yesterday for a few things and decided to grab a copy of Civ4. After I got home and tried to install it, I recieved a "catastrophic failure" immediately after inserting disk 2 during the installation. A little searching on the net revealed that the error meant I had a bad disk, so I drove back to the mall today after work, taking over an hour to fight rush hour traffic, and hurry home.

I dropped the new disks in my drive and ran the installation process again, only to get another "catastrophic failure" on disk 2. Publisher -> <- Me.

Now, would it be too wacky/odd of me to show up at Best Buy with my laptop in tow, and try to install every copy they have in stock until I find one that works?

Kharn

i had a similar problem with halflife 2.  it had like 5 cds i think

i tried installing the game 4 times.  each time it would get to cd 4 it would give some type of error.   after the 7  or 8th try it finally worked.

i switched out cd rom drives.  cables.  tried different ide cables.   all of a sudden it worked.  

and im the lead tech at my computer repair shop.    

I ended up taking my laptop along and exchanging the game. Third copy was bad, fourth copy worked. Its a very different game from Civ3, now you'll have a handful of cities instead of shoe-horning as many as possible onto a continent.  There's also a bit more intricacies involved with the government model, you have to pick a religion, bereaucratic method, etc, not just depotism, republic, democracy, etc.

That makes for some funny combos, in my current game, the Germans are Buddist, my country (America) is Jewish and I just beat the tar out of the Taoist Arabs.

Kharn