On my dual G5 (which does meet the recommended minimums) under 10.4.6, civ4 mac starts up and lets me choose game options. But when I click "Start Game", it gets stuck in the "Initializing Game" screen.

It still responds to command-H, so I was able to hide the game and take stack traces with the Sample app. I sent the trace along with my system profile to Brad. I hope he finds them useful.

In the meantime I wondered if anyone else had seen these symptoms, or found a way to work around them.

tnx!

UPDATE: upgrading from 10.4.6 to 10.4.7 fixed the problem.

Now I can play the game. Extremely early impressions:
on the dual 1.8MHz G5 with 1.5 Gig of ram and GeFroce 5200 card, the game scrolls around and zooms relatively smoothly. Not super snappy, but playable.
On the MacBook with 2Gig of ram the lack of a graphics card is fatal. The framerate as the game scrolls around from unit to unit is too slow for me to tolerate and the game is unplayable. This is interesting because the Windows version of the game perfoms adaquately under bootcamp.

On both systems I have the sound issues that others have had.