What will you play Civ4 on?

AlanH said:
If that'll run Civ4 Brad will have performed miracles ... and I'll be looking for another excuse to buy a new Mac :eek:
Are you telling me I'm going to have to upgrade? To what?
 
AlanH said:
If that'll run Civ4 Brad will have performed miracles ... and I'll be looking for another excuse to buy a new Mac :eek:

Exactly right.

Let's be realistic here. Civ4 has some fairly steep requirements on the PC side. It requires over 1GHz of CPU speed and a medium-range video card - and these are the minimum settings. Comparable Mac hardware will be needed -- at a minimum.

That means no 600 MHz G3s (and probably no 1 GHz G4s either), no Radeon 7500s or GeForce 2MXs or Rage 128s. If you are expecting to buy Civ4 knowing that the minimum requirements are much greater than what you have and you'll tough it out, I would strongly advise you to give that plan up.
 
Stonegate said:
Are you telling me I'm going to have to upgrade?
I have a 1 GHz AGP G4 and a GeForce 4MX 32 MByte video card. As Brad has indicated, my system is below the performance threshold where lots of PC players are having trouble. I do not expect my system to be able to run Civ4. If mine won't hack it then yours certainly won't.

I have had this system for six years, and it works fine for everything I do today. Now, I am either going to have to buy a new Mac or ignore Civ4 and stick with Civ3. I have a real problem with the thought of having to replace a perfectly seviceable Mac *simply* to play a game that's a bit of an enhancement to the one I can play today. Heck, I only play Civ3 maybe ten times a year :eek: $50 for the software would be fine, but $1500 minimum for a new Mac makes Civ4 a *very* expensive Civ3 upgrade.

Depends what else you need the Mac to do, IMHO. I would never let one game dictate what Mac I purchase.

Personally, I think it sucks that a turn-based strategy game has such stratospheric minimum hardware requirements. I suspect the only excuse is that it uses the same software architecture as the fast real-time games. As I've said elsewhere, PC users are accustomed to replacing their video cards and/or complete systems every few months, so maybe Firaxis can get away with demanding high end hardware. However, Mac users tend to keep their more-costly hardware for longer, and I can't believe you and I are the only potential customers that Aspyr could lose because of this.

*IF* I replace my Mac I will get a new Intel-based system rather than a G5 or a faster G4, simply because any new investment I make will have to be as future-proof as my existing one has been, and Intel is Apple's future. But really, Civ4 cannot be my sole justification for doing so, and it's difficult to come up with another at the moment.
 
If we have to upgrade to what you are suggesting, then Civ 4 must be one heck of a upgrade itself. Is it worth the upgrade? $1500.00 is a lot of money just to play a game. My G3 does everything else I want it to do just fine.
 
Hmmm... How about a 1.5 G4 with a 64/9700 video card? I've only had the system two years, it would be a bummer to have it shut out...
 
As someone who has played Civ4 a bit on a substandard PC, I'd say the new game is quite fun (even when I can't see the terrain and it crashes every 1-3 hrs). The civics and religion changes are pretty cool, as are the unit promotions. I think the modability will end up being the best feature- there appear to be some great mods coming down the pipe already. Unfortunately, my impression is that it is the bells and whistles that create the high hardware requirements. Here's what doesn't work on my PC: terrain, leaderheads (sometimes), wondermovies (hello!?- if I could run CtP wonder movies on my old as heck G3 imac, why are they so hard to implement on a computer with 10x the processing power?).

I'm not sure its worth a new computer, but it is definitely worth the $50.

btw- I'm hoping to play on my 15" g4 powerbook- 1.5ghz, 1gb ram, 64mb radeon 9700. My understanding is that this should work, although the game likely won't be blazing fast...
 
Alan, Civ4 may not be the *only* reason to upgrade your system.. you may think that your system runs everything fine that you're doing. But I can't help but think about my experience upgrading from dial-up to dsl a couple years ago... I always told my friends "my dialup is just fine"; but once I actually tried dsl, oh my gawd I realized my complacence with dialup was.. well let's just say, I had no idea how not fine it was. I bet if you got a new Mac, you'd be amazed to at the improvements :crazyeye:
 
iamliberal- very true! I would LOVE to get one of the new intel macs. However, I did upgrade to a new laptop less than a year ago, and the year before that I bought my PC laptop (had to get one for some genetic analysis software). Its now a question of cash availability- I'm finally out of school and above the poverty line and hoping to actually pay down some of my credit cards... My big purchase for this year will likely be a trip to France- I've gotten a bit of money to go to a conference but to make the trip worthwhile will mean staying longer, helping my gf by a ticket, etc...

ps- i'm still on dial-up(!), but if I end up being able to work from home more I will undoubtedly make the jump to something broader of band...
 
iamliberal said:
I bet if you got a new Mac, you'd be amazed to at the improvements :crazyeye:
No I wouldn't. I know what a new machine can do. I have installed several iMac G5s for friends recently and they do things about as fast as I can type and think, just like my own existing machine :)

I agree totally about broadband. I'd die if I had to go back. But that's a multiplying factor of 40 in performance, where the dial-up speed to download a 100K web page is 20 seconds - measurable with a stop watch.

I don't run complex Photoshop transforms, and I don't create or view multimedia extravaganzas. Nothing I do locally with my Mac can be measured with a stopwatch.
 
I have the 1.42 Ghz Mini with 512MB RAM etc. If it will run on this machine at all I'd do the 1Gig RAM upgrade. I'm highly skeptical of this, though. I've seen it run on a 2.4 Ghz Celeron with 1 GB of RAM and it had to have some graphics turned down, and the system bucked and hesitated a bit. The game just really pushes the graphics a lot, a lot of the stuff is moving all the time.

But, I just got C3C and I bet it will take me a year or two to really play through it all, so I'm in no rush to play Civ4, although I'm sure it is a better game. It really does look beautiful, that much is sure.
 
new guy said:
But, I just got C3C and I bet it will take me a year or two to really play through it all, so I'm in no rush to play Civ4, although I'm sure it is a better game. It really does look beautiful, that much is sure.

I've got both atm, Civ4 for my laptop. I'm still not fully attracted to Civ4. I just get exhausted w/ the 3D engine.
 
Brad Oliver said:
.... Comparable Mac hardware will be needed -- at a minimum.

That means no 600 MHz G3s (and probably no 1 GHz G4s either), no Radeon 7500s or GeForce 2MXs or Rage 128s. If you are expecting to buy Civ4 knowing that the minimum requirements are much greater than what you have and you'll tough it out, I would strongly advise you to give that plan up.

I thought that we were hopeful that we could play Civ-IV on a Mac Mini? I'm most concerned about the "no 1 GHz G4s" comment. I thought that it was fairly well established that the Mac processor speeds were vastly undervalued when compared to comparable PC processor speeds. That is, that a 1GHz PC is in no way analogous to a 1GHz G4.

I was really hoping that I could play it on my (2yo) iBook when it comes out. I was still planning on buying a new computer at some point, but the "no 1 GHz G4s" comment really hurts. That means that it won't run on my iBook and that I would would probably would be disappointed in how it runs on the bottom of the line Mac Mini. I don't really want to spend ~$600 to be disappointed, so maybe I'll just forget about it altogether.

I'll be very interested to see what the minimum requirements are when they are finalized.


M@
 
one_hoop said:
Aspyr is currently showing June as an estimated release date, so that gives me a couple more months to think about it and/or save for a new system... Perhaps the 1.5GHz Mac Minis will be sufficient?
Take note...

Brad Oliver said:
Any dates you see at this point are being pulled out of thin air. Place no stock in them yet.
Which was originally given as a response to another statement of June 1 that originally came out of Aspyr.
 
Beamup said:
Which was originally given as a response to another statement of June 1 that originally came out of Aspyr.

I should point out that our site says only June 2006, not June 1 2006 (for you optimists). It's all one big guess, and June 2006 is - indeed - one big guess. Frankly, I'm not sure why we're throwing a date out there this early on in development, but that's not my call to make.
 
Yep, the June 1 statement reportedly came from "Aspyr's sales administration manager" rather than the website, as reported on the CivFanatics front page.
 
one_hoop said:
I thought that we were hopeful that we could play Civ-IV on a Mac Mini? I'm most concerned about the "no 1 GHz G4s" comment. I thought that it was fairly well established that the Mac processor speeds were vastly undervalued when compared to comparable PC processor speeds. That is, that a 1GHz PC is in no way analogous to a 1GHz G4.

I was really hoping that I could play it on my (2yo) iBook when it comes out. I was still planning on buying a new computer at some point, but the "no 1 GHz G4s" comment really hurts. That means that it won't run on my iBook and that I would would probably would be disappointed in how it runs on the bottom of the line Mac Mini. I don't really want to spend ~$600 to be disappointed, so maybe I'll just forget about it altogether.

I'll be very interested to see what the minimum requirements are when they are finalized.


M@

I think you're right. I mean the 1.42 Mini I have seems way more than 2 1/2 times faster than the 600Ghz PC I have. Same amount of RAM. But light-years faster.
 
Hmm - Civ won't run on my PC laptop. Now I'm getting worried about my G5 iMac! I'm hoping it'll run it! (It's the first G5 iMac model, with the wimpy video card).

I agree with other people that it's a shame that Firaxis designed the game to have such high graphic requirements, given that it's PROUDLY turn-based and the graphics don't add to the general gameplay. It's also a game that's very popular with traditional non-gamers. I've played all Net versions of Civ against my siblings and father, all in the 35-65 year old age range (non-traditional gamers). Nobody owns a machine that can run the new Civ, so it's the first Civ we haven't bought... It would have been nice if they included an "ugly graphics" mode that could run on a machine with integrated Intel graphics... Frankly, I just want the improved gameplay - it could look like Civ 1 and I'd be happy...

Does anyone (i.e. Brad) know if it will be possible to play multiplayer against PC users?
 
The interesting part of the Mac Mini interrogation is that it also applies to later iBooks. Here's hoping...
 
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