Product Description

History as you know it, is history. Rule throughout time and create your own legacy as you guide your civilization from the dawn of man through the space age and beyond. Implement new technologies, conduct diplomacy or wage war to grow your society and become the most powerful leader the world has ever known.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1821 in Video Games
• Brand: Aspyr
• Model: 11250
• Released on: 2006-06-30
• ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
• Platform: Mac OS X
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds

Features

• Rule throughout time in this exciting strategy game
• Implement new technologies, conduct diplomacy, or wage war
• Become the most powerful leader the world has ever known
• Detailed, vibrant, 3-D living world; RTS-style, intuitive interface
• Multiplayer gameplay supported

From the Manufacturer
With Sid Meier's Civilization IV, history as you know it, is history. Rule throughout time and create your own legacy as you guide your civilization from the dawn of man through the space age and beyond. Implement new technologies, conduct diplomacy, or wage war to grow your society and become the most powerful leader the world has ever known.

Features:

• 3-D living world: detailed environments where animals roam and smoke billows from small huts, set in a vibrant and colorful world.
• Overhauled interface: RTS-style, intuitive interface allows you to manipulate units and cities with greater control and faster speed.
• Multiplayer: Built from the ground up for multiplayer with Era Starts, variable game speeds, hot join, team play, and a bevy of connectivity options--Internet, LAN, Play by Email (PBEM), hot seat, and more. The best multiplayer Civ experience ever developed means hundreds of hours of gameplay for you and leaders across the world.
• Customization: an unprecedented level of modding power allows you to customize the units, environments, and gameplay to meet your vision, including a WorldBuilder editor, XML, and Python scripting language editing.

Customer Reviews

So slow, you wish it had a civ3 view in the end!
Wow, don't go by the recommended requirements at all on the box with this. I have a 2.1ghz Imac with a gig of ram, and I have to run the game on the lowest graphic setting. The music is very choppy, but even on the lowest setting, the graphics are gorgeous. Gameplay is typical Civilization style. It's crashed on me numerous times, mostly when windowed, fullscreen made the game drag to a crawl (but no crashes), and I was wishing for a 'Civ3 view' under the options. I wouldn't recommend playing this on anything other than one of the newer machines with a ton of ram, or a quad style machine. If and when Aspyr updates with a patch that hopefully removes much of the resource hogging, I can easily give this 4 stars, but in it's current condition, I can only give it a 3, but I really feel it's more of a 2 right now.

***UPDATE*** (10/31/2006)
After applying the beta patch, I can easily give Civ 4 the 4 stars it deserves. Great game and Aspyr really shows how to make games on the Mac work.

Fun, crash, back to fun
I'm a huge fan of the various incarnations of Civilization. The other reviewers are correct -- ignore the system requirements at your peril and get as much RAM as you can! Speed is fine on a brand new Core Duo iMac. I experienced my first Mac OS X crash since Mac OS X Beta years ago when I increased the graphics settings. I backed them down a bit and things have been fine since.

Other than that one (serious) glitch, the game is great and I am losing whole blocks of time to Civ IV the way I did to previous versions of the game.

UPDATE: The new patch (1.62a) seems to have addressed the crash problem, although I have noticed minor problems with some graphics and audio. It is an improvement, but there are still some things that need to be addressed.

1.61 patch is much better than the initial release, but still slow
Ignore the system requirements at your own risk, because this thing runs like a fat sow on any machine more than a few months old. On my iMac G5 bought just a year ago, it's effectively unplayable at even the lowest graphics settings -- and that's at only 2000 BC! I won't even attempt to see what it's like with a full, modern world. Very disappointing.

UPDATE: Performance is massively improved by the 1.61 patch (released on 31 July 2006), but it still slows down quite a bit after a few thousand years. As before, ignore the system requirements at your own risk.