CivFanaticMan
Warlord
i have considered the ipad useless... until now!
I just got Civ 5 yesterday and last night I tried to get it working on my iPad (only a week old itself) with some limited success.
RDP is a way of viewing the desktop from a remote Windows machine on another machine. I use the in-built RDP client on my Windows XP laptop at work to check things on servers all the time. Well, some clever folks have built RDP clients for the iPad and iPhone too. I've found the iTap RDP and Wyse PocketCloud apps (I can't decide which one is better) to be very usable for simple tasks like sitting on my couch and connecting to the Windows 7 machine in my study to read my mail in Outlook. I've tried browsing in Firefox too and found that to be just as easy as using the native Safari app built into the iPad. I haven't tried an extended work session with RDP on the iPad yet -- but I do have the Apple wireless keyboard paired up to the iPad to give this a go sometime.
Anyway, back to Civ 5. Most attempts to run this just had the Civ 5 application start minimised and stay that way. But one time it stayed open, in a 1024x768 window, I think using DirectX 9, although I normally use DirectX 11 on my desktop. I was able to load the small game I already had going, zoom in and out of the map using the awesome iTap RDP finger gestures, and move around the map the same way. I spent roughly 10 minutes playing the game. While the graphics lag was noticable, Civ 5 was very playable at this resolution. Being a very mouse centric application, with nice big buttons to set research and outstanding production orders, it was easy to keep my fledgling civ running. I did have to zoom in on the battles to see the results, but that wasn't hard. I couldn't get the keyboard to work however. Well, specifically, I couldn't use the space bar to tell a unit to do nothing -- that's the only thing I tried. I had to click the unit's Do Nothing button instead.
The whole thing came crashing down when I tried to change resolution, and I couldn't get it working again after several attempts. Overall though, games like this do lend themselves to a touch screen environment. It was simply awesome to sit on the couch and hold my civ in my hands and explore it's wonderful world. If makers of these types of games made their products a little more RDP friendly, we might see people start to use the iPad in new and interesting ways.
Anyway, I may try again in the future to get Civ 5 to run reliably -- if I do I will post the results here.