Game freezing on iMac

[WizKazin]

I've sent two tech support tickets to aspyr and they have failed to answer despite it being over a week since the first time, so I'm reaching out here in desperation.

I am playing on a 27 in iMac and I've upgraded my ram to 40 GB so I have more than enough technically going on to run the game. It runs fine most of the time but then just randomly will freeze up for no apparent reason. It forces me to hard reset my computer each time. It seems completely random.

Does anyone have any idea of what is wrong? Or can if you don't know, are you at least having the same problem as me? I just wonder if this is a common problem on Mac these days ...

 

[Bentov]

Welcome to the club....very common issue. I'm sad to think that I will have to give up civ since I'm not buying a windows machine to play 1 game.

 

[LFRANK]

This a common issue on all of my Macs. I too have sent them several reports and been ignored.

I suspect the error happens when a call is made to Metal with invalid coordinates. You're probably seeing several very colorful stabs of color across your screen that multiply until the entire machines freezes. Metals is Apple's low-level graphic engine and is used for everything on the Mac now, hence the DOA machine.

I've had to go back to Civ V to be able to complete games as the constant rebooting to restart a frozen game is extremely annoying. I truly wish they would spend a release cycle fixing bugs rather than adding quixotic game modes.

Hope this helps.

 

[MoiMeme]

I have the same issue with latest 27" iMac. Also got 40GB RAM. It is the only game behaving this way.
I believe it is a case of bad programming, plain and simple. I would bet that Aspy knows what the problem is but is not willing to do what it takes to fix it correctly, and tries to take shortcuts - a.k.a. "fixes" - that don't work. It's been a year now.
The main issue is that we have been sold a product that is not fit for purpose. The game is unplayable. So we need to post reviews and flood Aspyr with tickets. Either they fix this or they remove the game for sale for the Mac platform, anything else is simple crookery.

 

[LFRANK]

Was away for a bit but am back and, at least on my MacBook Air M1, the graphic issue seems to have gone away. I've started several games that played for 300+ turns without it appearing. A couple of games have died between one turn and the next but lost no data and I was able to continue fine. Annoying yet workable.

I do agree that filling Aspyr's inbox with crash reports or logs can only make them pay more attention to the underlying problem and then cross our fingers that they eventually respond. Having once been in software development its sometimes not obvious what's causing the core issue that causes the problem.