Aspyr Media, Inc. today announced Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (Mac) has arrived in retail stores. The title was developed for the Mac by Aspyr Studios, Aspyr’s internal development team, under license from 2K Games.
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV comes-to-life like never before in a beautifully detailed, living 3D world that expands the gameplay experience. This latest installment takes the franchise to new heights with the addition of new ways to play and win, new tools to manage and expand your civilization, all-new easy to use mod capabilities and various multiplayer modes and options.
Key Features:
* Faster-Paced Fun – Gameplay has been streamlined for a tighter, faster, and more compelling experience.
* Greater Accessibility and Ease of Play – An easy-to-use interface will be immediately familiar to RTS and action game players, and newcomers to the series will be able to jump in and play.
* Tech Tree – Flexible Tech tree allows players more strategic choices for developing their civilizations along unique paths.
* Grow Bigger Empires – More Civilizations, Units, and Improvements to enhance and grow your empire.
* Multiplayer – LAN, Internet, and Play-By-Email offer players all-new strategies and ways to play when competing or cooperating with live opponents.
* Team Play – Whether playing multiplayer or single player, team play offers a new way of setting locked alliances that result in shared wonder effects, visibility, unit trading, and shared territory that delivers a plethora of new strategic and tactical options.
* Beautiful 3D world – Sid Meier’s Civilization IV comes to life with a beautiful 3D world, dozens of fully animated units (including culturally unique units), and totally customizable armies. Cities and wonders will appear on the map. Wonder movies are back!
* Mods and Community Tools – Designed from the ground up for modability, the game contains a powerful map editor with XML and Python support.
* Choose Your Leader – Most Civilizations now have two leaders from which to choose, with each Leader having traits that provide various bonuses to the player.
* Civics – With the discovery of new techs, civic options can become available. Freedom of speech or slavery? Hereditary rule or open elections? This creates endless government choices and possibilities!
* Religion – Now there are seven religions in the game that are unlocked through researching. When unlocked, the religion spreads through a player’s empire allowing them to use the religion to help manage happiness, gain gold and create Great Prophets.
* Great People – As the player uses specialists they gain Great People points in the city that is utilizing the specialists. Great People include the Artist, Tycoon, Prophet, Engineer, & Scientist. They can be used to get free techs, start Golden Ages, or join a city to increase its output.
* Promotions – Each unit has a promotion path that emphasizes specific unit traits. Promotions include bonuses to Attack/Defend on specific terrains/features, movement bonuses, sight/visibility bonuses, and increased withdrawal chances.
* In-Game Cinematics – Sid Meier’s Civilization IV has over 40 in-game cinematics.
Civilization IV System Requirements:
* Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later
* CPU Processor: PowerPC G5 or Intel chipset
* CPU Speed: 1.8 GHz or faster
* Memory: 512 MB or higher
* Hard Disk Space: 3.5 GB free disk space
* Video Card (ATI): Radeon 9600 or better
* Video Card (NVidia): GeForce FX 5200 or better
* Video Memory (VRam): 64 MB or higher
* Media Required: DVD Drive
Recommended System Requirements:
* Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later
* CPU Speed: 2.0 GHz or faster
* Video RAM: 128 MB
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV is rated “E10+” for “Everyone 10 and older” by the ESRB and is available for the Mac at $49.99 at http://www.aspyr.com. For more information, fans can visit Aspyr’s site, http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/civ4/ or 2K Games’ official Web site, http://www.CivIV.com
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The games are good. They are usually machine hogs.
just my $0.02
Woohoo! I’ve been waiting for this for a long time! The Civilization series is awesome. I played Civ 2 on my PowerBook Duo back in the 1990s, but had to buy Civ 3 for Windows because the Mac version took forever to come out.
I’m determined to make that my last Windows game purchase. Between Civ 4 and World of Warcraft, I think my gaming needs will be covered for quite a while.
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On an aside, why is it that Blizzard seems to be the only major game developer that has the programming ability and vision to release Windows and Mac versions in the same box, at the same time???
This one is definitely a resource hog. I have a dual 2.5 g5 tower and this game maxes both out to play.
It’s the most resource hungry mac game I have ever played. I hear it runs much better on intel macs though.
I was happy to play Civ IV last weekend. Great game!
Game play tests:
I have a Power Mac G5, 1.8 Mhz running the laterest version of Tiger, with 128 MB of VRAM, and 1 GB of RAM. With these specs I had to use a standard sized map with only 3 computer players, graphic detail on low, low-res textures, monitor resolution 1600×1000. The game runs VERY slow after about 1600 A.D. on my Power Mac G5, 1.8 Ghz Mac. I played all the way up to around 1850 A.D. before the game slow down became too frustrating to enjoy the game.
I feel that I’ll have to wait until I can afford a new Intel-based Mac before I’ll get to really experience this game in all it’s graphical glory.
Any one else playing the game on a similarly speced Mac? I think the published system specs are too low. Seems that Civ IV is really a game for a 2 Ghz or faster Power Mac or an Intel-based Mac.
I think I’ll go back and try a small map with only 2 computer player and see if I can finish a game before the system slows too much.
I wonder if purchasing a 256 MB graphics card would increase game performance enough to be worth the cost. Any advice?
Ugh.. I have a Powerbook G4, and it’s so sad to know that I’ll have to upgrade to play this game. Does anyone think that I’ll be able to get it to run? I know that the G5 is a 64-bit processor, but the Intel Core chips aren’t. Are there any other issues with running this game on a G4 that I should know before plunking down $50 to get a game that won’t run?
Even if performance is bad, I can handle that, I just want to know if it will run. I still play The Sims 2 on my Powerbook, and it runs pretty slow, but well enough.
Greg, i’m not sure if getting a better graphics card will help too much. i think the game simply doesn’t run too great on ppc based machines.
My dual 2.5 has an nvidia 6800 GT (256mb) and the game runs fine but it still gets very choppy/laggy after the renaissance era. The cool but most diturbing fact is that this game takes full advantage of both my processors. It’s the first game or even application that I have seen maxing/taxing both processors to nearly 100%.
If you have nothing else but civ4 running, activity monitor will show that the CPU usage on my system is on average between 180-190%! Kinda crazy for a turn-based game if you ask me! I’m praying for optimizations!
Does this run on Intel integrated graphics (low-end iMac, MacBooks, Mac minis)? I’ve heard the Windows version works okay with the Intel 950 crap.
i can’t believe that my 17″ powerbook isn’t powerful enough to run this game. the simulations that i build work just fine on it, and they have way more fidelity than this game. microsoft must have had something to do with writing the source code for the game.
forgot to add that i’ve noticed reading from intel mac owners (minus mac mini & macbook) on various forums that this game runs really great on macbook pros and intel imacs.
‘smooth as butter’ seems to be a common theme or phrase. the intels can handle the game better than their ppc cousins, but that was to be expected.
It could be that the game was optimized for the Intel Macs. I’m not sure how Xcode optimizes code with the “Universal Binary” option checked.
Based on the other players’ comments and the fact that Aspyr doesn’t list G4 chips at all I’m guessing it will be totally umplayble on a powerbook. The G4 has more disadvantages than just being a 32 bit processor. It’s cache is smaller than that of the core duo and its FSB is much slower. It has velocity engine that could really help out but most people don’t code their games to use it. The reports saying that it runs much better on an intel mac make me beleive that the code from the windows game wasn’t changed much to optimize it for power processors. I think a lot of games will be like this going forward. Porting from winx86 to macx86 will be easier than porting from winx86 to macPOWER ever was making gaming on intel machines better but increasingly the powers will be ignored. I would even guess that a low speed G5 will be all but useless for the mac games coming out in the near future. It’s sad to see all of that raw computing power being abandoned but except for the programmers that have always been good to mac hardware: Apple, Adobe, our favorite little app makers, few are going to write good code to take advantage of it.
Time to start shopping for a new Mac…
Looks like Civ 4 for Mac is definitely a resource hog. Take a look at the system spec for a PC:
Minimum System
—————
1.2 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
256 MB of RAM (Win2K) / 512 MB RAM (WinXP)
1.7 GB disk space
64 MB video RAM (GeForce 2/Radeon 7500 or better)
Recommended System
——————–
1.8 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
512 MB RAM
1.7 GB disk space
128 MB video RAM
Seems like the PC specs are much lower than the Mac specs, which probably says a lot about Aspyr’s porting efficiency more than anything else.
The speed of Aspyr’s ports have gotten much faster recently, I’ve noticed. Especially with The Sims 2 expansion packs. They could be cutting a lot of optimization corners that they haven’t in the past. That said, I still think they produce the best Mac games I’ve played.
I’ve heard from several PC Civ 4 playing associates that the PC minimum specs are too low and the real specs are much closer to the Mac specs.
I’ve been waiting for a “Civ” that doesn’t require Classic for a while. This doesn’t seem to be “it”, though. Maybe I’ll just go for the recently introduced Civ III instead – despite the critical remarks I’ve heard about it.
It’s a Turn Based Game, fer gahd sakes! What’s it doing sucking up all the resources of a DP system. Age of Empires (from MS via MacSoft) is almost that hungry (I have a dual 2.3 G5) but it, at least, runs continuously.
I have a 2.3gig dual-core G5 tower with 1.5gig RAM and a 17″ Apple LCD screen. I’ve set up and played 3 different games, with different sized maps with all of the graphic options, etc set to the highest, and except for some pauses in the soundtrack, I don’t notice any speed issues with the game itself. However, on 2 of the games, once I reach the 1600’s for time, the game will self-quit on me. I’m gonna try some games on lower graphic and smaller map settings to see if that makes a difference. My guess is that there’s probably a couple of quirks to get ironed out in a future update of the program. Otherwise, I love it, and its far superior to civ 3.
I have been using Civ4 on my MacBook 2GHz Intel with 2Gigs of Ram since last Friday and it plays just fine. Great game a lot different then Civ3.
Why can’t we download it? I’m stuck at work from 10am-10pm on weekdays making it tough for me to get to a store and buy this. I want to start playing today. Damn you aspyr!
Sweet, now Mac OS X has SIX total games!
Jay:
Order it here and have it mailed to you:
http://www.macgamestore.com/detail.php?ProductID=445