If any of you were bothered by Steam's limit of 4 players for Civ4 and missed introduction of Zulan's Gamespy replacement server, I'd like to point out that multiplayer community still survives outside of Steam. Unfortunately, registration on Zulan's was closed in July 2024, but his code is public on GitHub, so now a fresh server is hosted by Kvalitet. If you are interested, here[forums.civfanatics.com] you can get hosts file with entries pointing to where "Gamespy" can be found or an executable with that integrated to run out of Beyond the Sword folder. Hosts require switiching to Beta - Original Release (unsupported), while executable is told to be working with default Steam version as well as CD/GOG v3.19. If you were having trouble connecting through Direct IP, both Zulan's and Kvalitet's (as well as unpopulated OpenSpy.net) NATNeg may help you, but it's still preferable to configure port forwarding properly.

Come join our multiplayer Discord[discord.gg] or Telegram[t.me] (majorly russophone, but all polite people are welcome)