[dmetzcher]

I have a 12" iBook G4 running at 1.2GHz with 1.2GB of RAM and 32MB of video RAM.

The box for Civilization IV says that is requires a 1.8GHz processor (or above) and 64MB of video RAM. My RAM beats the minimum requirements, but one out of three might not be enough.

I've played games like The Sims 2, Railroad Tycoon 3, and World of Warcraft on my iBook, and they play great, but they don't have the higher requirements of Civilization IV, so I'm a little worried about buying the game and not being able to play it without major lag in the graphics, etc.

Has anyone played it before on an iBook G4, or can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks!

[oni]

It doesnt play the best on my dp 1.8 GHz G5 with 9600xt, so i wouldnt hold out much hope

[dmetzcher]

Originally Posted by oni

It doesnt play the best on my dp 1.8 GHz G5 with 9600xt, so i wouldnt hold out much hope

Bummer. Thanks for saving me some money, though. I'm holding out for an updated PowerMac at the end of the year, so I suppose I'll have to wait until then.

[- - e r i k - -]

Yeah, it's not smooth on my 2.0 G5 iMac with 2GB DDR RAM and ATI Radeon 9600 128MB either. But definitely playable. I love this game so much

[kent m]

It's chunky and slow as molasses on my 1.6 G5. Really unpleasant to play.

Which begs the question: how is it even possible to make a 'board game' that won't play on a G5 anyhow? I mean I had games like Myth running just fine years ago on the lowest powered g4 and it had just as many animations and sprites.

I used to love this game so much too, and the fond memories and great concept have kept me hoping and checking out each new version, but this game has been going downhill steadily since version 2... Despite having a lot of perks in the game play this latest version is probably the most poorly designed of the lot.

[P]

Civ4 is slow partially because it needs horrendous amounts of RAM. Partially this is because it is leaking memory, so restarting the game once every hour or two helps. Installing more RAM also helps - with the latest version (which helped!), 1.25 gigs of RAM and rebooting now and then, Civ4 is definately playable on my 1.8 GHz Rev A iMac. The gameplay is good enough - way better than Civ3! - that I'll put up with the slowdowns. kent m, my computer is only slightly faster than yours, so I think you can get it to run well if you get more RAM.

The graphics of the units is really detailed in Civ4 - too detailed. Compare it with C&C: Generals, you can see that those units are actually really clunky when zoomed in. Doesn't matter at all, because you don't usually play zoomed in that much. I wish Civ4 had units like that. The gameplay code is also quite complicated to run, because the AI is so much smarter in Civ4 than in earlier Civ-games, but I still think that it could be much faster than this.

To answer the origial question: No way, no how. Not even current Macbooks can run it (no hardware T&L). iMac G5 or Core Duo, PowerMac G5, Mac Pro or Macbook Pro is what you need. I don't know if a maxed-out Powermac G4 will play it, but no stock configuration will.

[Dork.]

I post occasionally on the civfanatics.com forums, and the general consensus there is that 32 MB video simply won't cut it. The type of chip also matters, since older chips can't do the texture and lighting algorithms that Civ IV needs.

I play it on my last-model-before-the-MacBooks 12" PB (I upgraded from a 12" G3 iBook specifically for Civ IV), and it's pretty darned slow. I don't think that your iBook would do the job.

[Dork.]

Originally Posted by P

The graphics of the units is really detailed in Civ4 - too detailed. Compare it with C&C: Generals, you can see that those units are actually really clunky when zoomed in. Doesn't matter at all, because you don't usually play zoomed in that much. I wish Civ4 had units like that. The gameplay code is also quite complicated to run, because the AI is so much smarter in Civ4 than in earlier Civ-games, but I still think that it could be much faster than this.

Civ IV is supposed to be very user-modable. I wonder if it's possible to mod with lower-res units and terrain that might render faster on slower systems?

[kent m]

Heya,
No, it ran/tuns slow from the start, and I've got the graphics settings to the lowest they can be set. When I tried to add effects like anti-aliasing it was just impossible. Again, it's worth mentioning that old and very pretty games like Myth played just fine on a low end G4...

It's probably too slow because the game designers are trying to pack too much info through the pipe: all the anims and such also have to work when the player zooms right in. Now, the zoomed in idea is a nice treat, but like you say I think it'll probably hardly ever be used at during game play beyond one or two first time "oo, that's nifty" attempts. Certainly nothing to sacrifice gameplay for, I'd say. You know, the one place where the 'zoom factor' might have really been cool was at the opening... after creating the world and parameters of the game it would have been a nice treat to have the spinning globe zoom in to your first units...

Another result of (what I think is) the designers getting caught up in the 'nifty zoom' effect is that, like you say, the units are too detailed - they haven't been designed as graphic units to be quickly recognized during gameplay, but rather to look good when zoomed in close. They're rendered nicely and all, but this is a game and I want to see & recognize my units quickly, not have to wonder what it is. The game designers, if they want to make detailed characters should go and work in film effects, not make games. This is a board game, not a movie... and like you say, the anims and designs are pretty clunky anyway. I would suppose that because of the amount of units and designs that it was a HUGE amount of work to get all of these done and they've obviously had to sacrifice quality and probably used templates, and the results are very awkward and unsatisfying. I feel they would have been better off focusing their design direction on what would have advanced the gameplay instead of trying to max out the 'nifty factor' or impress themselves with the zoom factor.

Add in other issues like the UI design - they say in the pamphlet that they put a lot of time into it but I really don't think they knew what they were doing or didn't test enough - because it's a really cluttered UI, with bits all over the place, and a lot of the nice mouse click shortcuts and keyboard shortcuts from previous versions have been discarded... other issues, like the fact that multiple units can share a space (which is nice, though I did like the old style of units not being able to pass each other as it makes for a lot of interesting tactical arrangements) but there is no graphic indication of what units share a space... the continuous center of the screen on each selectd unit which makes me seasick after a while... (the previous game only changed the centering of the screen when a unit was off the screen - if a unit was visible the game wouldn't change the centering...) ... the tiny space for the build selections in the city screen... it's all just bad design that makes the game harder to play... the worst offender is the tutorial... unbelievable that it requires to click the mouse after every single goddamn sentence in order to move on... or t he humorous fact that the "Play Now!" button brings you to a half dozen steps before you can actually play...

Anyway, it's a shame because it's such a nice idea for a game, the whole civ thing... Man, that's an essay...

[dmetzcher]

Originally Posted by P

To answer the origial question: No way, no how. Not even current Macbooks can run it (no hardware T&L). iMac G5 or Core Duo, PowerMac G5, Mac Pro or Macbook Pro is what you need. I don't know if a maxed-out Powermac G4 will play it, but no stock configuration will.

Well, I planning on getting one of the new Mac Pro models in January or February, so I suppose I can wait until then. I don't think I'll be playing many games on my iBook once I have a Pro anyway. Thanks for the info.

[P]

What they did right with Civ 4 is the AI, which unfortunately takes some CPU to run, and that they borrowed a bunch of shortcuts from the RTS games. Right-click to move, shift to queue commands... The game is also more balanced than any game since Civ2, and it remains fun to play all through the modern era.

They could have had both great zoomed-in units and a playable game if they had made the unit models progressively more detailed when zooming in. Cuts down a lot on the polygon count, and it can be done, but I guess they didn't want to bother. You're also right about the camera flying around - Civ2 was really good about only moving it when you had to, and also picking the closest unit to move next. You could certainly mod the game with simpler units, but it's a lot of work to make 3D units to replace every single unit. I doubt anyone has done it.

[selowitch]

I wonder if I would have better luck buying the Windows version of Civ4 and running it on WinXP via BootCamp on my new iMac Core Duo 20" with the upgraded 256MB of VRAM?

[Dork.]

Originally Posted by selowitch

I wonder if I would have better luck buying the Windows version of Civ4 and running it on WinXP via BootCamp on my new iMac Core Duo 20" with the upgraded 256MB of VRAM?

Doesn't the iMac core duo meet all the requirements for the Mac version of the game out of the box?

It has an Intel processor and a dedicated recent video card. That ought to be sufficient.

The MacBook only has the Intel integrated graphics, which is why Civ IV doesn't run so good on it.

[Dork.]

FYI, I've read about a memory leak in the game on the CivFanatics forums. I've started quitting and restarting the game after every session, instead of cmd-tabbing out and keeping the game in the background like I used to do, and the game does run faster now. Still slow, but more tolerable.

[Brad Oliver]

Originally Posted by Dork.

FYI, I've read about a memory leak in the game on the CivFanatics forums.

Some guy posted on civfanatics that he heard a rumor about a memory leak. I'm not sure it's progressed beyond rumor.

Has anyone seen memory actually leaking (via top or other tools)? Or is this all based on Civ4 running a little faster if you quit and restart more frequently (which does not imply a memory leak)?

[P]

I haven't verified it with top. I'll give it a shot this weekend - I just finished a major game (that I didn't win!) so I'm not too hot on firing it up again.

I do know that something like that is happening, though - if you save a game after a few hours and load it up again, it's slow. If you quit the game in between, the game loads in about half the time. The load operation is the most obvious one, since it's independent of the graphics, but the turn endings or when you sign Open Borders with someone (so it has to recalculate every single trade route) also show a noticeable improvement just after a quit-restart.

The reason I think it's a memory leak is that performance falls off a cliff after about two hours. Restarting more often than that doesn't seem to matter. top gives me about 800 MB free right now, with the regular batch of apps + Firefox + Entourage open. I NEVER have more than a single swapfile - right now I have 5, and the creation dates on the last four are all in the middle of a long Civ-playing session - all within days of me buying the game. If it's not leaking memory, it's sure using a LOT of it.

[Dork.]

Hi, Brad! Thanks for all of your hard work on this game. I really appreciate it (although the jury is still out on how much my wife appreciates it! )

I played for about an hour last night. An unfortunate incident with a dodgy CF card reader forced me to reboot, but I did manage to save this info. I'm a hardware person myself, and all I know about software is what people tell me. All I can see is an upward trend in both resident memory and virtual memory in a very small sample size, but I have no clue if that's normal or not. Resident Memory does seem reasonable, though, and I suppose next time I should keep track pf page swaps, too. So, of you need any different information (or, if there's any free software tools we can run that would provide different information), please let us know.

[FONT="Courier New"]
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
23804 Civilizati 52.7% 1:54.51 8 205 1427 268M 202M 303M 810M
23804 Civilizati 71.7% 22:56.72 9 217 1964 306M 217M 322M 863M
23804 Civilizati 70.2% 76:38.23 9 235 2296 335M 233M 375M 898M
[/FONT]

Keep in mind I'm running on my 12" PB, which is very much Not Supported.

[P]

Brad, check your email. I passed along some top logs.

Everyone, the command I used to make them was this:

top -l 0 -s 60 | grep Civ > civ_stat

To be executed before the game starts. If anyone has an idea for a better command, let me know.

[AclockworkApple]

its pretty intensive. id still give it a shot though put the settings at lowest