I have the Civilization IV: the Complete Edition DVD sans DRM. It works pretty well under Wine. But this is what it took (Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid):

I find it makes life easier to segregate my Wine apps, so first steps were:

export WINEPREFIX=/usr/local/civ

winecfg

There, I set Wine to also consider /usr/local/civ to be where my My Documents folder was, so the game would create its “My Games” folder there instead of under my real Linux home directory.

Wine 1.1.22. It failed with Wine 1.1.23, the current development release.
Used winetricks to install d3dx9 and msxml3
Needed this to get around a stupid sound bug:

mkdir -pv $HOME/.kde/socket-$HOSTNAME

Then just running

wine setup.exe

on the file at the top level of the DVD did the rest. I selected “custom install” so I could set a less long, obnoxious installation path than the default. I installed the just-released Beyond the Sword 3.19 patch.

I put Blue Marble on top of that, and ran vanilla Civ, Warlords, Beyond the Sword, and Colonization once each to create the appropriate folders under My Games, and to set the graphics and audio options to my preferences.

I edited each of the CivilizationIV.ini files in their respective directories under the installation directories to set NoIntroMovie = 1 and EnableVoice = 0. (The first is just by preference; the intro movies worked fine. The default EnableVoice = 1 resulted in a warning under Warlords, but not the others. Strange.) It didn’t work to set these just in the CivilizationIV.ini files under My Games, which I would have thought was the point.

Finally, I backed up the results so I won’t have to do all that again when I inevitably screw something up while playing with mods.

The startup scripts are simply like this:

#!/bin/bash

WINEPREFIX=/usr/local/civ 

/usr/bin/wine /usr/local/civ/drive_c/Program\\ Files/civ4complete/Civilization4.exe $@

Everything but a few cosmetic details works. Unit health bars don’t, city progress bars on the main map don’t (this can be ameliorated by requesting detailed city info in the options), the cursor animation doesn’t work, so it doesn’t turn into a little spinning globe when you’re waiting. So far as I can tell, everything else works. (And my words are backed by a Holy Roman spaceship at Alpha Centauri.)