Aspyr Announces Civ3 Complete & Civ4

Article over at IMG.

IMG

HA! You beat me to it.

The IMG article (for you lazy types):

Civ IV, Civ III: Complete Announced for the Mac
8:45 AM | Andy Largent | 5 comments

Aspyr Media just sent word that they plan to bring the latest Sid Meier hit Civilization IV to the Mac early next year. In addition, they will also be publishing Civilization III: Complete for the Mac this December, which brings with it two expansions as well as multiplayer to fans of Civ 3.

Civilization IV is garnering rave reviews already in its PC version, and looks to bring new strategic gameplay elements and a great-looking new 3D engine to the series.

Civilization III: Complete will help those who haven't yet experienced the addiction of the series get into the game. Here's a breakdown from Aspyr on this title due by the end of the year:

"Gaming fans can now enjoy Civilization III, the highly addictive journey of discovery, combined with the updated and enhanced multiplayer expansion pack Civilization® III: Play the World™, as well as all of the great new Civs, Scenarios, and Features from Civilization III: Conquests! Civilization III: Complete provides more ways to win, more ways to explore, more strategies to employ, and more exciting modes of play all in one box! Civilization III: Complete gives Civ® fans the opportunity to enjoy unmatched strategic gameplay alone or against players from around the world."

Much more infomation will be coming soon from Aspyr and IMG, so be sure to stay tuned for the latest.

The MacCentral article:

Aspyr Media Inc. on Thursday announced plans to publish Sid Meier’s Civilization III: Complete for the Macintosh in December 2005. Aspyr also announced plans to publish Civilization IV for the Mac in early 2006.

These are the next two installments of the legendary turn-based strategy game that puts you in control of the destiny of world empires, as you build technological, diplomatic and military capabilities, expanding the borders of your civilization, strengthing trade routes, fighting when necessary and more.

Civilization III: Complete combines the original game, as well as the Conquests and Play the World expansion pack. Conquests adds new civilizations to the mix as you pursue some of the most famous conquests in history — battle for Mesopotamia, for example, or try to control the Americas. Play the World adds, for the first time, multiplayer capabilities to the series, enabling you to take on players over the Internet.

And I just decided "to join the dark side" and add a PC to my hardware list.

OTOH this will allow me to pay 2 games concurrently.

DocOrlando said:

HA! You beat me to it.

Click to expand...

It's what I use my planning periods for, zipping around the sites. Pathetic actually.

But, sweet news just the same.

The emotion,....I think I'm going to cry.

YESSSSSS!!

Hopefully Civ IV will be available for my birthday! (March)

*crosses fingers*

Great news! I knew they'd come through. Civ3 Complete is showing as alpha status in the Aspyr project list. I do hope the fortunate beta testers that Matt signed up are beating it up properly.

And C-IV
Now to my problem. My GeForce 4MX card is probably under spec for C-IV. I have the following set of undesirable options:

1. Buy an over-priced Mac video card to put in my aging, soon-to-be-retired G4/AGP tower.

2. Buy a new PPC Mac, within months of the arrival of the IntelliMacs.

3. Play C-IV, if possible, on my challenged hardware until it bites the dust to be replaced by an IntelliMac.

4. Think horribly different and buy a PC just to play C-IV. Never in a million years!

Thoughts?

AlanH said:

Great news! I knew they'd come through. Civ3 Complete is showing as alpha status in the Aspyr project list. I do hope the fortunate beta testers that Matt signed up are beating it up properly.

And C-IV
Now to my problem. My GeForce 4MX card is probably under spec for C-IV. I have the following set of undesirable options:

1. Buy an over-priced Mac video card to put in my aging, soon-to-be-retired G4/AGP tower.

2. Buy a new PPC Mac, within months of the arrival of the IntelliMacs.

3. Play C-IV, if possible, on my challenged hardware until it bites the dust to be replaced by an IntelliMac.

4. Think horribly different and buy a PC just to play C-IV. Never in a million years!

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

I've been reading some of the early performace threads in the Civ4 General subforum, and there are people reporting that Civ4 is running well on systems below the minimum requirements re: video card. The minimum is an ATI 7500, which I have. I just hope it stays that way through the porting process. Civ4 will be built w/ Mac OS X Intel in mind, per a Glenda Adams post at IMG. Right now, I say wait and see. How does the GeForce 4MX card compare to the Radeon 7500?

The most authoritative post I've found on the subject was a list of cards ranked by suitability. 4MX was classed as the lowest - "Basic", which I take to mean that it will barely run it. It's a 32 MB card, so under the Firaxis spec of 64 MB. It's listed as having T&L, which seems to be mandatory. Sorry, I don't know the relative merits of the cards, and the forums are soooo sloooow today that it would take forever to trace the post I found last night.

I'm most interested in the tech requirements on this, too. I boosted my G4/AGP to a 1.0 GHz processor from its lowly 400 Mhz beginnings, but I've been twitching over getting a new video card. I don't want to blow a wad on one, though, if I don't need to.

While I would love to have C3C, I think I'll just wait for C4...tough to 'splain to the wife the need to blow $100 on both, especially when she's already going to have to deal with my increased absence around the house when I get locked into a new game. I've waited this long; I can wait a little longer. It would make a good birthday present (Feb.) but I'm guessing that since C3C was only in Alpha stage on Aspyr's list and C4 was nowhere to be seen, it might be a better Father's Day present instead...

Applause to Aspyr, et al, for stepping up for the Mac gaming community. It feels good to be recognized like this. I hope Mac gamers step up accordingly and reward Aspyr for their efforts...which is the best way to encourage them to keep with the timely ports.

They'll get my cash, for both, for sure.

I boosted my G4/AGP to a 1.0 GHz processor from its lowly 400 Mhz

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You went the same way as me. My early-adopter 350 MHz G4 Sawtooth was transformed by the 1GHz upgrade ... plus 7200 rpm big disk ... and the 4MX for Quartz Extreme ... and over a GByte of Ram ... and Panther, and then Tiger. Now, it still feels good. Only the 4MX video is starting to look sad against the C-IV specs. Can't see why a turn-based strategy game needs high-end hardware graphics rendering, but that's progress for you!

i'll buy both too, but C-IV will probably have to wait. my mac has only 32 mb graphics ram, below minimum i bought my mac this august (which haven't yet crashed ) and i don't feel like buying a new computer just for a game.

the announcement for C-IV came very early. aren't Aspyr taking a risk by doing so? people might ignore C3C and go straight for C-IV. couldn't that make it hard to find another mac-C3C civer to do MP against?

I'm not too bothered about multiplayer. C/GOTM will do me fine. Now I can find out what all the fuss was about with Conquests. And with everyone off playing with C-IV we'll have the C/GOTM ranking tables to ourselves for a few months

This is great news, although Civ3 Complete is of course extremely late it'll still be nice to have. Not that I exactly relish rebuying the thing, but I suppose I will.

About graphics cards... I think that you can get away with the bare minimum if you disable most of the graphics. Unless the port comes out horribly bad, I think both a Radeon 7500 and a Geforce4 MX will be able to play the game. In general, they are very similar and produce similar performance. Both use an old architechtures (original Radeon and Geforce2, essentially) with minor additions and clockspeed bumps to become the low-end options behind the Radeon 8500 and the Geforce4 Ti. The performance is extremely similar.

Fredrico said:

the announcement for C-IV came very early. aren't Aspyr taking a risk by doing so? people might ignore C3C and go straight for C-IV. couldn't that make it hard to find another mac-C3C civer to do MP against?

Click to expand...

Think of Aspyr's Civ3 as a "thank you" to the fans. I'm personally thrilled that I can go back and "finish what I started" so to speak. It has always galled me to no end knowing that PtW and Conquests never made it to the Mac.

kf97mopa said:

About graphics cards... I think that you can get away with the bare minimum if you disable most of the graphics. Unless the port comes out horribly bad, I think both a Radeon 7500 and a Geforce4 MX will be able to play the game. In general, they are very similar and produce similar performance. Both use an old architechtures (original Radeon and Geforce2, essentially) with minor additions and clockspeed bumps to become the low-end options behind the Radeon 8500 and the Geforce4 Ti. The performance is extremely similar.

Click to expand...

What is T&L? It is listed as a PC requirement for the video card.

I feel a variable for the low-end video cards is Aspyr and what the developers identify as Mac-specific performance needs. I know this has bumped RAM requirements from PC to Mac, at least during one mac Civ3 patch (MacSoft). I wonder how much minimum requirements can change from PC to Mac. Aspyr doesn't shy away from producing a polished product, which is not a complaint.

AlanH said:

Great news! I knew they'd come through. Civ3 Complete is showing as alpha status in the Aspyr project list. I do hope the fortunate beta testers that Matt signed up are beating it up properly.

And C-IV
Now to my problem. My GeForce 4MX card is probably under spec for C-IV. I have the following set of undesirable options:

1. Buy an over-priced Mac video card to put in my aging, soon-to-be-retired G4/AGP tower.

2. Buy a new PPC Mac, within months of the arrival of the IntelliMacs.

3. Play C-IV, if possible, on my challenged hardware until it bites the dust to be replaced by an IntelliMac.

4. Think horribly different and buy a PC just to play C-IV. Never in a million years!

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

Alan -

I thought that Macs supported the AGP interface - can't you just get an AGP card? If you had a PC, then 4MX card will cause you the black terrain issue - but of course the Mac release won't have directX, so you might not have that problem.

If you can just throw-in any AGP card, then I'd recommend an nVidia 6600GT or 6800 - you can probably get either of them for around GBP 100 (max). Either of them should run the PC version of CIV with no problems....

ainwood said:

If you had a PC, then 4MX card will cause you the black terrain issue - but of course the Mac release won't have directX, so you might not have that problem.

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I'm confident we won't.

If you can just throw-in any AGP card, then I'd recommend an nVidia 6600GT or 6800 - you can probably get either of them for around GBP 100 (max). Either of them should run the PC version of CIV with no problems....

Click to expand...

NVidia doesn't sell retail cards for the Mac, but even so - I'd recommend an ATI card instead. The Radeon 9600 and higher will be a great bet, although I imagine with just a 1GHz G4, you'll be CPU limited to a large degree so it'll be a semi-futile upgrade. We'll know more as we get closer to release, of course.

dojoboy said:

What is T&L? It is listed as a PC requirement for the video card.

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"Transformation and Lighting." It means that the card has to support matrix math and lighting in hardware. It can be extremely slow to do these things in software. However, what this probably means is that the game requires features equivalent to an AGP-capable Radeon, like vertex buffer objects for fast transfer of 3D vertices from the game to the card.

Brad Oliver said:

"Transformation and Lighting." It means that the card has to support matrix math and lighting in hardware. It can be extremely slow to do these things in software. However, what this probably means is that the game requires features equivalent to an AGP-capable Radeon, like vertex buffer objects for fast transfer of 3D vertices from the game to the card.

Click to expand...

Thanks Brad. Are all Radeon cards AGP-capable? That may be a stupid question, mine is listed as an ATI-AGP in the system profiler. I think?

Btw, you may need to change your title now - below your forum name.

@Ainwood: My Mac was one of the first to support AGP, which is where my 4MX lives. Your scheme would be great, and don't think Im not researching it,. Here's the story so far. Read it and weep ....

The first problem is that my AGP slot isn't a real 4MX slot, as it doesn't support the full length AGP connector, so there are hacks out there (literally!) to take a hacksaw to the edge of a real 4MX card and cut it to size to fit my wannabe AGP slot. Apparently you only lose the connector bits that pick up extra power that's not needed unless you want to connect to certain card-powered Aplle displays

The second issue is that that Macs don't drive the standard video card ROM as supplied for PCs, so we Mac users get ripped off at inflated prices for "Mac Edition" cards with the on-board drivers changed. There are hacks out there for this as well, but they involve death-defying stunts with an AGP-equipped PC to re-flash the ROM. I don't knw if I can lay my hands on such a PC, and if I could, I'm not enthusiastic about laying down a hundred of our earth poounds and watching it turn to warranty-trashed dust when this fails.

Sooo ... I've been exploring the possibility of buying a Mac ATI card (the only Mac edition 4MX cards around these days apparently) and chop it down to size. I can get an ATI 9600 for Mac for £165, maybe less. Taking a hacksaw to that would be trauma enough