I used to play this game successfully just over a year ago on Mandriva 2007.
I now run Mandriva 2008 powerpack and have installed the game again (with the patch civctp-1.2a-english-unified-x86.run).
But the graphics are running painfully slow.
There are recommendations to reduce resolution (little or no effect, until 800x600 and lower, by which point the picture is awful), or to change the x graphics to 16-bit colour rather than 32-bit (I tried to do this with the nVidia controller but came across warnings about why it couldn't do it fully).
But I don't really want to degrade my whole PC experience for one game and I'm not convinced it's necessary. It's not as if mine is a MHz stretched system:
Athlon 64 3000+ (using 32-bit mode)
RAM 2GB
nVidia Ti4200 128MB

And it is all working fine, I've rechecked on Stellarium - smooth as silk.

Perhaps my monitor really is that much bigger that I notice how poor lower resolution graphics are now.
Is there a tweak in the game configuration that may be wrong?
Or alternatively, could I set up a boot configuration just for playing this game?