Clueless gamer: need help with Civ 5!

I've been a long time Civ 4 player, and about two years ago I recieved Civ 5 in all it's glory! Here's the catch: I couldn't download it! I had a preexisting Steam account which I tried to get the game on to but had no success. I'm thinking it was the piece of junk computer I had that prevented the game from running.
Anyway, flash forward to today and I have moved on from Steam. I probably would have kept it had Civ 5 downloaded fully, but considering I had only one other game on it, I though it best to delete Steam altogether. I've also left that crap PC for a Mac (please control your moans of disgust). I recently booted up Civ 4 again and suddenly asked myself: is it time to move on? After all that time hearing friends rave about Civ 5, I was finally considering playing it myself.
So here are my questions:
Is there a way to play Civ 5 without Steam (legally, mind you)?
Would you advise against playing Civ 5 on a Mac?
Should I just wait for Civ 6?

I realize I'm a little late jumping on the bandwagon, but this copy of Civ 5 is just sitting there taunting me. Please Help!

Cant find the post, but someone talked about pretty much the same thing you are asking here... if I remember well, the answer was basicaly that its impossible to run it out of steam and prevent any patching from steam.

I cant help you to install it, some poeple would be better than me to do that, but I stongly recomand that you give it a shot! Being myself a late adoptor, I really enjoy that game and still hooked on.

Good luck

You could launch civilization and then log off steam.

KingKong76 said:

Cant find the post, but someone talked about pretty much the same thing you are asking here... if I remember well, the answer was basicaly that its impossible to run it out of steam and prevent any patching from steam.

I cant help you to install it, some poeple would be better than me to do that, but I stongly recomand that you give it a shot! Being myself a late adoptor, I really enjoy that game and still hooked on.

Good luck

Click to expand...

I think I may have found the thread you were referring too. It basically turned into a rant about Steam before a moderator closed it, but I did manage to find one gem in it:

"To answer the OP, it is required that you connect to the internet at least once to validate your key against the steam server. At this time it will also download the first patch, but if you installed from game from the DVD, that isn't too big (10s of MB) but for your internet connection may still be too much.
The good news is that after you validated it once, you can put Steam into off-line mode and play without ever connecting to the internet again."


My question is this: do you ever need an Internet connection to Steam again after downloading? If I remember correctly, I thought Steam had to connect to the Internet for you to view and open your game library.

You need to access the online library to download&install it, but after that you can just play whenever you wish, on offline mode.

Yeah, as said above. Get it all downloaded, and the latest patches installed. Then you can just put Steam in "Offline" mode. CIV5 will still run fine. I put Steam in Offline mode quite often when I'm creating a mod because in Online mode sometimes the SDK (mod-makers toolkit) just hangs and hangs and hangs while looking for a connection to Steam. If your ISP or whathaveyou is temporarily offline, this can be extremely annoying.

Yea^^ What this guy said. You could offline and log off.

LeeS said:

Yeah, as said above. Get it all downloaded, and the latest patches installed. Then you can just put Steam in "Offline" mode. CIV5 will still run fine. I put Steam in Offline mode quite often when I'm creating a mod because in Online mode sometimes the SDK (mod-makers toolkit) just hangs and hangs and hangs while looking for a connection to Steam. If your ISP or whathaveyou is temporarily offline, this can be extremely annoying.

Click to expand...

So let me get this straight: Theoretically I could get Civ 5 downloaded to Steam at a friend's house with a much better PC, and when I returned home I could log on to Steam with a different computer and be able to play Civ from that very Steam account? If this is so, could I do such with a Mac?
Sorry, but I'm obviously very clueless when it comes to this sort of thing!

BewareMontezuma said:

So let me get this straight: Theoretically I could get Civ 5 downloaded to Steam at a friend's house with a much better PC, and when I returned home I could log on to Steam with a different computer and be able to play Civ from that very Steam account? If this is so, could I do such with a Mac?
Sorry, but I'm obviously very clueless when it comes to this sort of thing!

Click to expand...

Not sure how you made that leap in thought

Even when you have steam set to "offline" mod, it is still checking that you have a valid and legal copy of the game before it lets you start play. And you still need to have the game installed on whatever computer you are using to play it on.

From what I know you need a computer with steam installed and an account set-up and also a good internet connection. The mac requirements for civ 5 (from the steam store page) are:


Minimum:
OS: 10.7.5 (Lion), 10.8.4 (Mountain Lion), 10.9.3 (Mavericks)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (Dual-Core) CPU Speed: 2.4 GHz
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 8 GB
Video Card (ATI): Radeon HD 2600
Video Card (NVidia): Geforce 8600
Video Card (Intel): HD 4000
Video Memory (VRam): 256MB

Recommended:
Processor: Intel Quad Core
Memory: 4GB
CPU Speed: 2.4 GHz
Video RAM: 1GB

If you have the game from the cd follow the instructions here to add it to steam:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5414-TFBN-1352

Once you add the game to your steam library it will download (with latest patches) and install.You can play the game in offline mode if you want, although if you have an internet connection there are not many reasons to play it without steam logged in.

Once the account is set-up and the game is added to your steam library you can login on steam on any computer, download the game and play it, but that does NOT mean that you and someone else can share an account an play the game.
If you do not have the expansions I would highly recommend getting at least the last one (BNW) since the vanilla is not really that good. If you wait you can get it at a steam sale for 70-80% off. Most of the DLCs are also worth it.

claudiupb said:

If you wait you can get it at a steam sale for 70-80% off. Most of the DLCs are also worth it.

Click to expand...

This. Just wait for one of those 75% off sales (they come often enough) on everything CiV-related and get them all at once (maybe minus the map-packs, unless you really want them).

There is one non-Steam version of Civ5, from the Mac App Store.

OP, sounds like you already purchased Civ5 once. I have a Mac, and wish I had gone with the App Store version -- but not nearly enough to repurchase. I think you should try very hard to get into your Steam account, but that is one of things I dislike about Steam. All your “purchases” are very ethereal, and I expect that you are out of luck.

Are you Conan?

TheologiaCrucis said:

Are you Conan?

Click to expand...

How'd you know?

TheologiaCrucis said:

Are you Conan?

Click to expand...

Who is conan?

Good news. Managed to recover my old Steam account through some intense email archive searches, and now I have Civ 5 running like a charm on my Mac. Still getting used to the new gameplay, but I'm crushing right now as Montezuma (then again, I am on chieftain). Thanks for the help!