A Report from Way Under Spec

OK, since my DVD drive in my revA G5 iMac choose the day before Civ4 arrived to suddenly not read disks any more, I have been forced to use my fall back machine for work and play. This machine is an upgraded Power Mac G4 / 400. Current cpu is a 1.4 GHz OWC something or other w 1 MB cache. The video card is a Radeon 8500 64MB (on a 2X AGP bus!). RAM is 1.2 GB (OK so I am over minimum there, but its slow olde RAM).

I am running OSX 10.3.9 and having a blast! Really! I have only played a tiny map (tutorial) and a standard size map with 5 opponents (I think). Scrolling is a clunky chunky affar, but I had most sounds (music, Nemoy, truncated ambient sounds/work noises, so not perfect, yet nearly there), but there are surpisingly few glitches. Coming from Civ2 (yeah, I know...), my perspective is that this should be a turn based strategy game, not a smooth as butter FPS. I have had one KP (note that the ambient temp in the 'hood was about 100 F, and I have my cpu clocked as fast as she will go... faster and she overheats and - heh - KPs). I have had a few sudden quits, but I find if that happens, it will happen again and again - restarting fixes it. I noticed that if I just left the game up for hours on end it sometimes crashed.

Running in a window did not seem to be any faster. I tried all the .ini tweaks and they might have made things a bit more smooth - very minimal. I tried the terminal tweak of altering the rendering path, but it did not seem to make any difference.

One graphical glitch: when I zoom out on the globe, my territory goes bright red. That is it! Glows work, even on lowest settings it looks pretty good! Seriously guys and gals, this game must be a beast under the hood, so I would cut Brad/Aspyr a little slack.

True the opening movies play like a really hyperactive slide show and the leader heads (and Sid - we love you man!) move like they are in molasses, but the flavor is there. And things will probably get better. Soon™®©


SOME SUGGESTIONS

I would like to offer this info to Brad and the kind folks at Aspyr to help them assess how to improve performance and playability for everyone, so take these ideas with a grain of salt.

- any way to make the mini map 'snap to' a click rather than the clunky pan? that would speed up my machine's game enormously! make it a toggle switch =)

- reduce the sensitivity of the edge o map scolling (turning it off helps, but it would be nice to toggle this on the fly?)

- any way to offer a reduced graphics option? say by reducing the number of trees/jungle bits etc by say 1/2 or 1/4?


Personally I am looking forward to playing it on a new Intel MacPro Tower (soon!) 2-4 CPUs 2-4 GB RAM Radeon x1800 256

I also am playing the game on a under-spec machine. I have a PowerMac G4 1.25 GHZ with a radeon 9000 64MB and 768 megs of memory. So my specs are even lower. I am having a blast playing this game. I have played all the way through once (Small map)and I am close to finishing another game (Standard Map). Besides the sound and A little choppyness I have no problems. At this point I consider it a great buy if you have a machine like mine. With all the problems that the high end machines are having, the game runs as smooth as can be expected. I was suprised how well it does. I have not crashed once. And once I left it running all night. It was still there when I woke up. Granted, I only got about 4 hours of sleep that night. I do want the sound though, BAD.

My processor is of course being pushed to the limit but I have not noticed any additional noise coming from the fan. I keep checking my CPU Temp. And it only rises slightly when I play the game.

I have a G4 iBook with a 1.33 PowerPC processor, 512 mb RAM, and a Radeon 9550 graphics card with 32 mb RAM.

The game actually runs. Needless to say, I've turned the sound off, and basically turned everything down that could be turned down. It's slow, but playable, and I haven't had any crashes yet - with an all day session yesterday, and some hours today. I've had a few minor graphics problems with units turning blue once or twice, but nothing besides that. I play on a small map, and although the game slows down as it progresses, it's still bearable.
Funnyly enough, I actually get a message at startup saying that my computer is below minimum specs and that the game wont run.

Currently considering an investment in some RAM.

Heeere's Father of the Bar Mitzvah from MacAddict! (crowd roars with excitment!)

So my first post here after years of playing Civ II MGE and hanging out at Apolyton under the screen name of MacUser; seems like Apolyton has gotten VERY PC-centric since I was last there.

I'm posting in this thread because while I DO have the min req.s it seems like I'm a decided minority, and my experience more closely resembles the under powered set.

I'm using an iMac G5, 1.8 GHz/512 MB/NVidia GeForce FX 5200 with 64 MB VRAM running Mac OS X 10.3.9 (7W98).

I have some sound (music for major discoveries and Mr. Nimoy) but as with others no unit or movement sounds during game play. I have not had the game crash or any kernel panics. My experience with the graphics is similar to enkiduMT. My only real complaint is the time lag for the land to scroll between units during the turn and the significant pause between movements and turns. I have attributed this to my min hardware, but on the other hand, maybe not. I do think it is quite playable, although I most definately enjoy the Civ II MGE experience more, mainly due to the speed of the turns and movements.

I agree with enkiduMT, if there is a way to disable the panning and just jump to units (similar to Civ II) and tone down the graphics in general for low end machines, I would really appreciate that!

I have mangaged to get it going(ish) on a G4/450DP

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=176906

Look at the screen shot in the above link

Well, it arrived.

Needless to say it's an underwhelming experience trying to run it on my 1 GHz G4 Sawtooth with Geforce 4MX 32 MB video card, the worst issue being that fog of war only appears to apply to trees and rivers. They are black outside the range of my units, but all the rest of the map is fully visible from 4000 BC.

Never mind! The point of getting it at this stage was to try to set up my Mod Installer to operate with it. So now I have no excuses. Hmm, where did I leave that Blue Marble file set?

AlanH said:

Well, it arrived.

Needless to say it's an underwhelming experience trying to run it on my 1 GHz G4 Sawtooth...

Click to expand...

On the bright side, I've heard rumors the next desktop is going to have Woodcrest processors.

AlanH said:

Well, it arrived.

Needless to say it's an underwhelming experience trying to run it on my 1 GHz G4 Sawtooth with Geforce 4MX 32 MB video card, the worst issue being that fog of war only appears to apply to trees and rivers. They are black outside the range of my units, but all the rest of the map is fully visible from 4000 BC.

Never mind! The point of getting it at this stage was to try to set up my Mod Installer to operate with it. So now I have no excuses. Hmm, where did I leave that Blue Marble file set?

Click to expand...

Aren't your graphical problems going to make testing mods a bit... er, difficult?


JoAT

I don't need to make the mod work - that's the mod-maker's job. I just need to make sure it ends up in the right place.

Running 1 GHz G4 imac with 512 MB and 32 MB VRAM.

The game actually works - sort of. You can imagine that it is really slow. Still having fun though. Will have more fun after the WWDC when I get a new Mac.