For anyone who comes across this now, I took the plunge into 12.04 and have got Civ4 Complete running perfectly

I'm using Wine 1.5.10, and have the following overrides:

d3dx9_26
d3dx9_31
d3dx9_32
d3dx9_33
d3dx9_34
msxml3
msxml3r

All are set to "Native, then Built-in", and I copied the DLLs from a Win XP virtual machine.

I also have Civ5 working - I gather that is less of a challenge, but if it helps anyone for that I have:

d3dx9_26
d3dx9_31
d3dx9_32
d3dx9_33
d3dx9_34

again set to "Native, then Built-in", and I installed d3dx9_36 and vcrun2008 as directed by the Wine DB instructions: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=21465

I'm pretty clueless about overrides in Wine, so some of the above might not make sense, but hopefully this will help someone in the future