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Being a veteran C3C player recently converted to Apple, I was delighted to get the Mac version of the game. And while the game in itself still procures the same enjoyment as it did before, I'm afraid Aspyr ported it rather poorly.
Gameplay wise, everything seems pretty much right on track. The game plays exactly the same, and the only inconsistency I've noticed with the PC version is the absense of an 'auto-clean pollution' command for your workers.
Performance is disappointing. C3C is a very old game - many played it on P3s. And yet, my 1.33 GHz G4 w/ 512 MB, doesn't seem to run the game as smoothly as it should, at least when compared to a similarly equipped PC. It's not unplayable, but turns in the later stages of the game take a long time to complete, and cultural borders take forever to recalculate when I capture/raze a city. The music stutters a lot during AI turns, which is not terrible but still annoying, especially considering that I never saw anything like that when I played on a 850 MHz Duron w/256 MB. Another annoying bug occurs on the Advisors screens (F1-F6). On the upper-right corner of the screen, there's a text box with a hint from the advisor you're consulting. The hint auto-updates every few seconds. Every time it does, the screen is completely cleared and redrawn, which takes 2-3 seconds, during which you can't do anything.
Aside from that, curiously, battle sounds don't seem to play, and the same goes of foot/horse steps you hear when you move a unit. Unit death and bombardment sounds play as usual though.
Worthy of note is the fact that the game does not ship with an editor, though according to posts on CFF PC mods and scenarios work just fine. Also, the Mac port does not compress savegames, which means the folder containing them can become quite heavy.
All things considered, my gripes with the port are minor, and have not gotten in the way of my enjoyment of the game experience.
So that's all I have to say for now. More will come as I play the game.
Gameplay wise, everything seems pretty much right on track. The game plays exactly the same, and the only inconsistency I've noticed with the PC version is the absense of an 'auto-clean pollution' command for your workers.
Performance is disappointing. C3C is a very old game - many played it on P3s. And yet, my 1.33 GHz G4 w/ 512 MB, doesn't seem to run the game as smoothly as it should, at least when compared to a similarly equipped PC. It's not unplayable, but turns in the later stages of the game take a long time to complete, and cultural borders take forever to recalculate when I capture/raze a city. The music stutters a lot during AI turns, which is not terrible but still annoying, especially considering that I never saw anything like that when I played on a 850 MHz Duron w/256 MB. Another annoying bug occurs on the Advisors screens (F1-F6). On the upper-right corner of the screen, there's a text box with a hint from the advisor you're consulting. The hint auto-updates every few seconds. Every time it does, the screen is completely cleared and redrawn, which takes 2-3 seconds, during which you can't do anything.
Aside from that, curiously, battle sounds don't seem to play, and the same goes of foot/horse steps you hear when you move a unit. Unit death and bombardment sounds play as usual though.
Worthy of note is the fact that the game does not ship with an editor, though according to posts on CFF PC mods and scenarios work just fine. Also, the Mac port does not compress savegames, which means the folder containing them can become quite heavy.
All things considered, my gripes with the port are minor, and have not gotten in the way of my enjoyment of the game experience.
So that's all I have to say for now. More will come as I play the game.
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