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I finally caved and bought Civilization V

HawtTuna

HawtTuna

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 30, 2010
61
1
After seeing mixed reviews about how Civilization V plays on OSX on the latest 13 inch MacBook, I decided to just splurge and buy it.

I'll update with my impressions tomorrow and hopefully I might help somebody in the same situation as I was in. I might even get a video up.

MacBook specs:
320m
4 gigs of ram
5400rpm 250gig hard drive
Snow Leopard 10.6.6
 
The patch is coming late this week or early next, you might want to wait for that. It may have some performance tweaks in addition to bringing the game up to parity with the PC version.
 
Cougarcat said:
The patch is coming late this week or early next, you might want to wait for that. It may have some performance tweaks in addition to bringing the game up to parity with the PC version.
Click to expand...

Not to mention a huge bunch of balance changes. Tactical and strategic combat AI stands out as being particularly bad pre-patch.

I haven't touched Civ V in weeks; waiting for the patch like many others (and time to play)
 
Thanks guys. I actually just tried to launch the game and it crashed after the itro movie, haha.
 
HawtTuna said:
Thanks guys. I actually just tried to launch the game and it crashed after the itro movie, haha.
Click to expand...

TBH, I don't why you are laughing. You just spent around 30-50 dollars on a product that fails miserable... the same happened with Civ IV. I will not buy Civ V until Aspyr get their act together. It's truly pathetic! :mad:
 
irishgrizzly said:
I bought the Steam PC version – can I use on the Mac side without re-purchase?
Click to expand...

If you bought Civ V and it had a Windows+Apple logo next to the game, then yes, you bought both version --- I did this with Civ IV+ 3 expansion recently (total cost $6.49!!! :D)
 
irishgrizzly said:
I bought the Steam PC version – can I use on the Mac side without re-purchase?
Click to expand...

NeverhadaPC said:
If you bought Civ V and it had a Windows+Apple logo next to the game, then yes, you bought both version --- I did this with Civ IV+ 3 expansion recently (total cost $6.49!!! :D)
Click to expand...

That's not an accurate answer. You can download Mac and PC versions of Civ 5 off of Steam regardless of where and how you purchased Civ 5. (That's what I did: bought the PC disc and installed the Mac version. Yay!)
 
NeverhadaPC said:
If you bought Civ V and it had a Windows+Apple logo next to the game, then yes, you bought both version --- I did this with Civ IV+ 3 expansion recently (total cost $6.49!!! :D)
Click to expand...
I picked up the Civ IV bundle, too, even though I already owned all of them; it was worth $7 to effectively get no-CD patches for all of the Civ IV games! (Hello, long nights playing games on the laptop....)
 
HawtTuna said:
Thanks guys. I actually just tried to launch the game and it crashed after the itro movie, haha.
Click to expand...

Heres a workaround til the patch:

Edit "Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/UserSettings.ini", and change:

SkipIntroVideo = 0

To:

SkipIntroVideo = 1

Funny, though, I have the same specs as you but no issues.
 
Is the crash caused by playing the intro mov? I got the impression that the intro played fine for the OP but the actual game crashed. (The intro mov is just a standard h.264 mov file that you can play from the Finder, so it'd be really weird if the intro mov couldn't play when starting up Civ.)
 
Cougarcat said:
The patch is coming late this week or early next, you might want to wait for that. It may have some performance tweaks in addition to bringing the game up to parity with the PC version.
Click to expand...
Any links?

bluebomberman said:
Not to mention a huge bunch of balance changes. Tactical and strategic combat AI stands out as being particularly bad pre-patch.

I haven't touched Civ V in weeks; waiting for the patch like many others (and time to play)
Click to expand...
It is getting better but the latest oddities are terrible embarkation behavior from the AI and the usual suicidal attacks. At higher difficulty levels the AI will just spam terribly planned cities or not even build settlers until you are at war with them.
 
Alrighty, so I managed to play a little bit today. Apparently Civilization V does not like me skipping the intro movie, if I watch the entire thing through it loads to the main menu fine but I attempt to skip it crashes. That's rather annoying.

Onto the game's performance itself.
My settings are:

Native Resolution
Leader Scene Quality: Low
Overlay Detail: Low
Shadow Quality: Off
Fog of War Quality: Off
Terrain Detail Level: Medium
Terrain Tessellation Level: Low
Terrain Shadow Quality: Off
Water Quality: Low
Texture Quality: High

I'm only in the early stages of the game and while it's playable, the frame rate is rather low. I've discovered about two other civilizations (I'm playing on the Earth map) and there are about four or so other civilizations left with their own territories.

I can't imagine what it will be like once I get farther into the game. Bumping down the resolution down does help a bit but then you get black bars running down the sides.

I wish I could give you an actual number for the FPS. Moving around the map is a pain, the fps takes a noticeable dip there.

I'll report back once I get farther into the game and I bump down the settings a little more such Texture Quality and Terrain Detail.

For now if you're on the fence about buying Civ V and you only meet the minimum requirements, I'd say hold off until the patch. I would say go to back to Civ IV but Beyond The Sword has an unplayable FPS for me too for some reason. I guess Civilizations just hates my MacBook.
Vanilla Civ IV still works fine, however.

Cougarcat said:
Heres a workaround til the patch:

Edit "Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/UserSettings.ini", and change:

SkipIntroVideo = 0

To:

SkipIntroVideo = 1

Funny, though, I have the same specs as you but no issues.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll use that to skip the intro next time.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
HawtTuna said:
Onto the game's performance itself.
My settings are:

Native Resolution
Leader Scene Quality: Low
Overlay Detail: Low
Shadow Quality: Off
Fog of War Quality: Off
Terrain Detail Level: Medium
Terrain Tessellation Level: Low
Terrain Shadow Quality: Off
Water Quality: Low
Texture Quality: High

I'm only in the early stages of the game and while it's playable, the frame rate is rather low.
Click to expand...

This reminds me, one of the reasons why I stopped playing was because I actually suffered worse performance sometimes on lower graphics settings - it would be silky smooth and then the frame rate would plummet to jittery stuttering barely responsive badness for like 5 to 10 seconds at a time. I couldn't win.
 
I bought it also, on a splurge kinda... (giftcards I needed to use)

Now, I have played it for a while, and I can't figure out why I can't kill some cities! Ill get them down to one, and they just wont take any more damage. Is that because they are not city-states? lol

and it is SO SO SO hard to take city-states. lol. I get demolished.

Playing from an econ standpoint I think I am getting the hang of it... but wheres the fun if you can't crush Rome?
 
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elmateo487 said:
and it is SO SO SO hard to take city-states. lol. I get demolished.
Click to expand...

City-states get the most advanced military tech available. So if you or an AI civ gets access to riflemen, so do all city-states.

Conquering city-states generally aren't worth the trouble; city-states don't even try to win the game.
 
bluebomberman said:
City-states get the most advanced military tech available. So if you or an AI civ gets access to riflemen, so do all city-states.

Conquering city-states generally aren't worth the trouble; city-states don't even try to win the game.
Click to expand...
It varies and more so when the technological era changes. (along with bonuses and strength) I have seen City-states with nothing more than Pikeman in a Rifleman era, have better units than I do, and/or even capture enemy cities when they are you allies. They tend to raze most of them though.
 
I wonder why loading times are so long...

I ran the Windows version for a long time with Wineskin, before the Mac version came out... the graphics rendering with the native version is a bit faster, which is nice, but the load times from start up, to turn loading, to everything... is much slower... hopefully they'll get that fixed some in a patch.
 
Last edited:
Eidorian said:
It varies and more so when the technological era changes. (along with bonuses and strength) I have seen City-states with nothing more than Pikeman in a Rifleman era, have better units than I do, and/or even capture enemy cities when they are you allies. They tend to raze most of them though.
Click to expand...

First, I don't think units upgrade automatically; they have the ability to build/upgrade to the most advanced units available, but they won't necessarily toss their pikemen out in the industrial era. (The AI's inability to properly disband or upgrade obsolete units was one the the major criticisms of Civ V.) Second, if they have more advanced units than you, it's supposedly because an enemy civ has a tech that you don't. So if say some civ on the other side of the world gets the tech to unlock riflemen before you, all city-states then get the ability to build/upgrade to riflemen.

Or maybe the progress is measured by eras and not individual techs?

Or maybe it's random and the AI's just messing with us. :p I wish I could be more confident in my assertions, but this is all info I think is from an old Three Moves Ahead podcast and not from anything written in stone.
 
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