Macworld Forums: Sid Meier's Civilization V - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Sid Meier's Civilization V here

I agree with the 3.5 mice score.

I bought this from a MacUpdate promo, and I'm running it on a 2.0ghz Mini.

First, I dislike having to mess with Steam to get the game to play in standalone mode. That's a real annoyance.

Second, it's crashed once in about 10 games. Not a great batting average, but unfortunately about par with the rate I had problems with Civ IV.

Performance is lousy on my Mini when I view the graphics-rich map. So I'm playing on the hex grid, which is comfortable for me as an old board gamer.

The single biggest performance hit continues to be the absolutely -moronic- panning when moving the screen focus from one map location to another.

Some interesting new wrinkles to the game, still a fun game to play, but overall no particular advance on the -computer- side. Slower unit build is OK for me, as a big part of my game is the planning. Since I play for a diversion from work, I don't mind stupid AI (since consistent winning is part of -my- entertainment value.)

deemery, on 14 January 2011 - 08:49 AM, said:

Well it isn't any better on a Mac Pro dual quadcore with 24gb of ram with a 4870 GPU (equally slow on my 27" imac quadcore i7). This is so graphically intensive. later in the game a turn can compute for over a minute (really with 8 xeon cores cranking away??) I eventually turned down the textures which sped it up, and turned off battle animations. But that's absurd! Panning is so slow when you have a huge map.

Also there is an annoying flaw where occasionally a ranged unit can't attack a city (all the cells around it) until a melee unit take a swipe at the city first.

My son really like the game, but having not played any other of this game type has nothing to compare it too. He actually got the PC version which ran fine under Boot Camp on my NVidia 7300GT. I transferred the game to the mac side via Steam and it would not run with the same card (it was time for an upgrade anyway).

I have a love/hate relationship with Steam. The ability to move between my Boot Camp and Mac platform, and being able to save games to the cloud is nice. The PC copy of Civ V came with The Americas's DLC bundle. With this installed on the PC side I could not open saved PC games under my Mac, as the DLC packs are not supported on Mac (hopefully they will fix this at some point!).

Overall I agree with the rating after the recent update fixed the crashing issues and some other annoying glitches.

Jeffco8: I asked Aspyr and they said they'll be adding the DLC as soon as they can.

I really miss Alpha Centauri, best "Civ" incarnation ever. It's always baffled me why they have never redone that version, or even better, created an EPIC hybrid going from caveman to space age and then managing both Earth and Alpha Centauri into the future.

ebonfyre, on 14 January 2011 - 10:39 AM, said:

Yeah, Alpha Centauri is one my favorite games of all time. One thing I really miss from those days are the videos for the wonders as it really made building seem cool and added a lot to the feel of the game.

As for Civ V, it has been more or less unplayable for me. Every game I've played in it has crashed at some point either during play or when I came back to load a saved game. Things like having to watch the silly cutscene at the launch of the game while it takes forever to load a simple menu are rough spots which get more and more annoying and speak to a lack of care and attention in the development of the game. It definitely has a phoned in feel to it. It is also amazing that we can have more and more photo-realistic realtime FPS games which run very well, yet games like this struggle to get a relatively simply pseudo-3D map rendered efficiently. Overall a poor showing from at least a technical side.

I am a huge Civ fan and have played various versions for more than a decade .... and I'll play this one a lot.

But it's nice to see a reamlistic review ... versus the usual Sid is God reviews that over-rate many Firaxis titles.

I find Civ 5 intriguing, but not riveting so far. But they have made some huge strides to make the later part of the game more interesting.

Civ V works as a game and it is much richer than Civ IV. It is thus a worthy update. The main problem is STEAM. this program is a piece of rubbish. As you can't play Civ V without steam, a buggy program that crashes regularly and takes the whole game out with it, then it reduces the value of the game from 3 stars to ZERO stars.

I'm on my 5th re-install, and steam is still "updating" (started at 1105 YESTERDAY and it is now 0730 - 20.5 hours later!). Won't EVER be buying anything else connected with STEAM!

I've also got this through the MacUpdate promo. 1 word : not impressed.
Civ IV is waaaay better.

Why only 18 world leaders, fewer wonders and technologies, no espionage, etc.? I would have thought the answer would be obvious... The developers want to hold back content to sell to us via another series of expensive expansion packs. And then do it all over again with Civ 6 in a few more years!

This constant rehashing and reselling of the same basic game, great as it is (was?), certainly has become wearying over the years.

ebonfyre, on 14 January 2011 - 10:39 AM, said:

Legal issues, EA owns the IP. It would be great if Firaxis could work out a deal with them, AC was definitely the best. They'd have to get Brian Reynolds back, though.