Gog has sold out big time. It offers CIV IV with the full suite of Sypware from 2K. I will never trust Gog in the future.

Another one who thinks he can read an EULA.

I can read well enough to see that I have to agree to have a Bot installed I my computer if I want to use a product I paid for (years before they started demanding this). This bot will record everything I do weather it's in game or not. That's Spyware plain and simple. Sadly it's you who doesn't understand the written word.

No such bot exists.

You base your latest statement on willful ignorance. You just can't accept that your failure to read the terms of service (all of it), has lead to your being used, and abused by 2K. The Gog EULA can say anything it wants. It has no bearing on what 2k's installer will do. Gog's claims of being DRM free are just that, claims. They are not true.

Prove it.

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If this isn't DRM you "prove it."
BTW this is only a small part of it. I know you don't like to read.

EULAs are wishful thinking from the publisher. When I said "prove it", I told you to prove any sort of such software exists embedded in the game.

Have fun searching for it, I'll just hint that nobody in the past 18 years, including scene crackers and regular modders, never found any :)

Not a very good troll effort.

Considering I'm rated by an experienced one, I'll take that to heart :P

Enjoy your day, lolcow.

A true conspiracy theory artist.

All the traits shown including thinking they know something others don't. Thinking what they are saying is of utmost importance. In the end, not really being able to prove anything they say.

When you think you know more than others and you know something truly game changing, take a step back and rethink everything as you are wrong.

And even if this was true, you do realize you could just deny the process any outbound connections? (A largely moot point since any multiplayer service that Civ IV ran on was long ago discontinued.)

Well that all sounds nice, except for a couple of facts.
One: The sypbot runs weather you have the game running, or not. It's spying whenever your computer is on. Reporting back home whenever you have an internet connection on.
Two: It's not just Civ IV. It's all 2K owned games, which includes ALL the Civ games. It's irrelevant how old Civ IV is.
Three: My original point was GOG claims to have DRM free games. Which is clearly a falsehood.
These are important facts that seem to be beyond your cognitive ability to understand.

Technically, corpo spyware is not the same as DRM. DRM is some usually highly invasive piece of software explicitly designed to stop you from playing a game you didn't legally purchase by any means necessary.

Spyware can let you play the game all you want and just stripmine your information in the background regardless of how you got it. As long as this information isn't used to prevent you from playing a pirated game or punish you for doing so it wouldn't be DRM by any definition.

However, as others have stated: This supposed spybot has been looked for by others much smarter than you or I and nobody has found any shred of evidence for its existence.

If the devs were able to devise spyware 20 years ago that even today nobody can find neither by observation or inference and nobody has ever suffered any negative effects including degraded system performance, I'm sufficiently impressed to just bow before their might and surrender my data.
Because in that case it's already in everything including your toaster, nobody knows about it and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Oh, now I get it. You're talking about MS Windows, right? You're right. 2K should not rely so heavily on this 'spyware'.