Most complete Civ 4 experience on a mac?

[Steven P]

Hello,

I'm rediscovering my love of Civ 4 after taking several years off. Many things have changed since I last played it, including my own computer. I now use a Mac.

I'm now trying to figure out how to achieve the most complete Civ 4 experience on the Mac. I purchased a downloadable copy of Vanilla from Amazon and that's where I'm starting. What do I need to do now?

I need to find and download BtS, I assume. What about mods? I used to use the BUG mod on my PC back in 2009 and I remember liking it a lot. I also hear that there is a popular "Better AI" mod, but I haven't determined if this is available for the Mac. Are these mods available for mac? Are there other "must-have" mods for Mac that I should be looking at?

I know that I could purchase some sort of windows emulator for my mac, and I might consider that ends up being the best option.

Thank you to anybody who responds.

 

[AlanH]

Hi. Welcome to Mac-land.

Have you found the sticky FAQ thread in this forum? There may be comprehensive answers to some of your questions there. Here are some short answers …

You should have instructions in the Amazon receipt on where you should download it. As far as I can tell, you download it from your Amazon account, in your "Games and Software Library". I have no information about that method of purchase, but I suspect that you have bought the Mac-only version. Amazon also sell the BtS expansion, and you would download that in the same way. I don't recommend trying to buy the different expansion packs from different places. The chances of them working together are not high, as each vendor uses a different Digital Rights Management (DRM) system (aka. copy protection to you and me).

Mods? Most mods DON'T work with the Mac versions of Civ4. This is because most mods are built using custom Windows DLLs that are not compatible with the Mac versions. BUG is a notable exception to this. There's a thread here that includes information on how to use BUG with the Mac. Note that the thread includes information on an edit that is needed for the later versions of BUG to run on a Mac.

If you need to run Better AI or other DLL-enhanced Windows mods then you may have to repurchase the Windows version of the software and run it in a Windows virtual machine. Have a look at z0wb13's thread on getting it going under WINE on a Mac. Alternatively, you could use Windows running in software like Parallels, or VMWare, or VirtualBox.

Best of luck!

 

[s.bernbaum]

Another Mac forum sticky that you might like to look at is "Mac Modding Index". It has links to many of the mods that work on a Mac.

 

[z0wb13]

i'm going to toot my own horn and point you to my thread (thx for the props, AlanH).

the windows version of civ4 with Beyond the Sword expansion is the definitive version.
personally, i'm really down on the aspyr port. it's buggy and slow, and you're pretty much guaranteed to have crashes on every game you play through to the end. performance is just totally unacceptable for anyone seriously trying to learn this game.

if i were you, i would order the Civ4 Gold DVD from amazon (here) and then follow my guide to install it on mac. anything with a core 2 due or better and 4GB RAM should be able to run it just fine, even faster than the aspyr port. playing it using this method is really solid, crashes very rarely (equivalent to running it on windows), and let's you play almost all of the mods you find on this site, with some caveats.

the steam Complete version (here) should work also, but it costs more and i haven't tested it personally, although i've seen many reports of it working just the same as the disc method.

 

[Steven P]

Thanks for the replies. Although I was tempted to try the WINE install, I ended up buying the aspyr game. I successfully loaded the BUG mod, but when I started BTS, I discovered some sort of glitch in the graphics making the trees flicker. It is only the trees and only on BTS. Warlords and Vanilla look fine (this is the all-in-one "complete" edition).

Searching the forums lead to no answers on the tree flicker issue. One or two people seemed to have experienced it with no resolution. The graphics settings don't seem to make any difference. If anybody has heard of a solution to this, I'd love to hear it. If this is a known issue with the Aspyr game (but not the WINE installation), I'd love to hear that too.

Thanks again for the help.

 

[z0wb13]

try turning off anti-aliasing in the graphics options in the game.

 

[Xyth]

Thanks for the replies. Although I was tempted to try the WINE install, I ended up buying the aspyr game. I successfully loaded the BUG mod, but when I started BTS, I discovered some sort of glitch in the graphics making the trees flicker. It is only the trees and only on BTS. Warlords and Vanilla look fine (this is the all-in-one "complete" edition).

Searching the forums lead to no answers on the tree flicker issue. One or two people seemed to have experienced it with no resolution. The graphics settings don't seem to make any difference. If anybody has heard of a solution to this, I'd love to hear it. If this is a known issue with the Aspyr game (but not the WINE installation), I'd love to hear that too.

Thanks again for the help.

What graphics chipset do you have? If it's a pre-2011 integrated Intel chipset, then that's the problem. No solution, they just aren't any good for 3D games.

 

[Steven P]

Mine is the early 2011 Macbook Pro, maybe it has one of those old chipsets. Thanks.

 

[Xyth]

Mine is the early 2011 Macbook Pro, maybe it has one of those old chipsets. Thanks.

Since it's a MacBookPro it'll also have a dedicated NVIDIA or ATI/AMD graphics chipset. They don't any problems running BTS, but be sure your MBP is switching to them properly ('Automatic graphics switching' in energy saver preferences). I recommend the free gfxCardStatus tool as a way of being sure. I have a 2010 MBP and get the tree flicker you describe if I accidentally launch BTS with the integrated graphics.

 

[AlanH]

I don't think 13" MBPs have discrete graphics. This one has Intel M3000, I believe.