Hi, I know this has been talked about a lot in this forum, but the different answers have confused me a little. I really want to play the Civ 4 on my Mac, but I have a G4 with modest-to-good specs, and I'm hoping to find a way to make it work, as it'll be awhile before I can afford a new machine. I downloaded the Demo, and it runs w/o animations, but with no landscape graphics at all. They sort of fade in a little as I run the game. It's your standard G4: 1.07 GHz PowerPC G4, 768 MB RAM.
Is there anything I can do to get the basic gameplay graphics--or get the terrain to show, anyway? I recognize it'll play slow later in the game, but at least at the top it clips along, if in a universe of blackness.
Thanks a lot folks.

The demo is not representative of the real game as far as graphics are concerned. It displays black terrain on my MacPro, which has (almost) no trouble with the released version. So you really can't use the demo as a gauge of the way the purchased software would run.

Having said that, I'm sorry to inform you that, while your G4 is a perfectly respectable machine for the majority of everyday tasks, it is way below "modest-to-good" relative to the Civ4 requirements. Before I got the MacPro I had a G4 tower that I'd upgraded to 1GHz and over 1GByte memory, with a 32MByte GeForce 4MX graphics card. That system barely runs the purchased Civ4. It displays odd graphics, and runs it like a three-legged pig. You haven't said what graphics hardware you have, but unless it's seriously high powered I wouldn't recommend that you buy Civ4 for your current rig.

I have to agree with AlanH-- I have a dual 1.8 Ghz G5 with a gig of ram, and I'm woefully under spec.

I recently upgraded the graphics card from a FX5200 to a GeForce 6800 GT (borrowed from my brother's PC) and the new card helped, but I'm afraid the clock speed of my G5 is the limiting factor.

For everything else, my G5 is a champ, but not for Civ IV.