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I've posted this at IMG forum, but I'm not getting any responses (it might be that not many people have this game if they didn't attend MWSF) so here I go again.
First I own a G4/AGP 400/Radeon with 348 MB Ram 200 allocated to Civ3 under OS 9.
My Thoughts (taken from my post at IMG with some edits);
after playing Civ3 for few days on my G4, i'm rather dissapointed by the quality of the port. I also own the PC version of Civ3 (bought it when it just came out) which I run on a Athalon 600mhz and there is a big speed difference between the two. The mac version is really slow. I finally managed to run in OS X, and after disabling quartz text, the game is much more playable than OS 9 version.
First off, a huge problem that bugs me is that preferences do not stick. by this i mean when i change preferences, such as turning auto-save off and always wait until end of turn on from the main menu, the changes I make to prefs dont stay. they revert to default no matter what. the only way i got around this is to start a game, change the prefs within the game and then save the game. that ensures one's own prefs to be saved, but only for that particular game session. and starting postion linked by culture will be always be true since that cannot be changed before the game starts. i have always turned that option in PC version because I want random neighbors. another minor issue that might be linked to this problem is that the difficulty level always goes back to chieftan when starting new game. and i never play anything other than diety. (i've actually won my first diety game last week on pc)
Second, there is a huge performance problem under OS 9. It is almost unplayable on my G4 with 384 mb ram. i believe it needs some optimization work. everytime i scroll map or move units, there is a lag and i hear that clicking HD accessing noise. Imagine the lag when u have multiple units moving across the roads/rails. they should move smoothly, not pause and lag after every tile movement. However this does not occour in OS X. Im quite impressed by the X version, its much faster than the 9 version. One thing I figured out is that turning off quartz text for X gives huge performance boost and prevents crashes. The 9 version also seems to leak/fragment memory and leaves me about 100 mb short in memory when i exit the game.
Both of the versions have some audio problems. Music gets choppy especially in main menu setting up a game. After experimenting with turning on/off "disable music" option, I no longer can get music back. but thats not a huge loss since civ3 music is kind of bad. another audio issue is there is no sounds during battle.
Im not sure if some of these problems are specific to my mac, so if anyone else experiences these problems please post.
although the mac version seems much slower than the pc version, some parts of the game is actually faster IMO such as the time it takes to start a new game and loading saved games. anyways i hope there is a patch soon to fix some annoying problems.
Brad if you read this please reply!
First I own a G4/AGP 400/Radeon with 348 MB Ram 200 allocated to Civ3 under OS 9.
My Thoughts (taken from my post at IMG with some edits);
after playing Civ3 for few days on my G4, i'm rather dissapointed by the quality of the port. I also own the PC version of Civ3 (bought it when it just came out) which I run on a Athalon 600mhz and there is a big speed difference between the two. The mac version is really slow. I finally managed to run in OS X, and after disabling quartz text, the game is much more playable than OS 9 version.
First off, a huge problem that bugs me is that preferences do not stick. by this i mean when i change preferences, such as turning auto-save off and always wait until end of turn on from the main menu, the changes I make to prefs dont stay. they revert to default no matter what. the only way i got around this is to start a game, change the prefs within the game and then save the game. that ensures one's own prefs to be saved, but only for that particular game session. and starting postion linked by culture will be always be true since that cannot be changed before the game starts. i have always turned that option in PC version because I want random neighbors. another minor issue that might be linked to this problem is that the difficulty level always goes back to chieftan when starting new game. and i never play anything other than diety. (i've actually won my first diety game last week on pc)
Second, there is a huge performance problem under OS 9. It is almost unplayable on my G4 with 384 mb ram. i believe it needs some optimization work. everytime i scroll map or move units, there is a lag and i hear that clicking HD accessing noise. Imagine the lag when u have multiple units moving across the roads/rails. they should move smoothly, not pause and lag after every tile movement. However this does not occour in OS X. Im quite impressed by the X version, its much faster than the 9 version. One thing I figured out is that turning off quartz text for X gives huge performance boost and prevents crashes. The 9 version also seems to leak/fragment memory and leaves me about 100 mb short in memory when i exit the game.
Both of the versions have some audio problems. Music gets choppy especially in main menu setting up a game. After experimenting with turning on/off "disable music" option, I no longer can get music back. but thats not a huge loss since civ3 music is kind of bad. another audio issue is there is no sounds during battle.
Im not sure if some of these problems are specific to my mac, so if anyone else experiences these problems please post.
although the mac version seems much slower than the pc version, some parts of the game is actually faster IMO such as the time it takes to start a new game and loading saved games. anyways i hope there is a patch soon to fix some annoying problems.
Brad if you read this please reply!
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