Civilization® V App Reviews

I bought this game, played it a lot, and really enjoyed it. I run an old OS X because I have some expensive, but dated music software that cannot run on a more recent OS. When this game issued an updated, it made it impossible for me to access the game. It prompts me to update my OS, but as noted earlier, that would be an expensive change to make. I paid $30 for this game and it was essentially taken from me by the update. I doubt I will ever see my $30 or get my copy of the game back. I suspect that the license agreement somehow gave them the right to alter my copy of the game even though it is on my own computer. There was a time when downloading software on your computer meant it was yours to control - sadly many license agreements seem to be shifting away from this. I could bother to read through the legal notice, complain to Apple or the developers of this game, and try to get my money back or somehow have my copy restored, but we all know that will never happen. I probably signed away any rights I had when I bought it and fighting it is not worth the effort for a $30 game. Nonetheless, I feel like I got screwed. I find it frustrating and think it is a dishonest business practice. In the future, try not to swindle your customers. Even if the update that corrupted my copy was issued with good intentions, in practice it stole $30 from me.

Cant access the dlc looked online said to update to new software did it and it doesnt work please fix this issue

My first brush with Civilization V was not a very good one. With the fifth installment of the series, it was choosen to shake up traditional game concepts and revise the way the game was played. As a result many interface options and controls are completely different in Civilzation V. Compared to Civ IV, it is very disappointing that the core game does not allow for multiple leaders per faction in order to mix up gameplay. Factions, and their single leaders, now possess a single perk that adjusts the rules for that faction (such as reducing production costs for the Americans) as opposed to the pair of traits that leaders traditionally brought to the table. The menus themselves are more cumbersome to navigate and unless you work your way through a set of sub menus, you won’t have the opportunity to create a new game with the features you llike. The game simply chooses for you! However, once in the game things seem much better. Gone are the competing Civics and government types of earlier games. Now, instead, you pursue social policies that have no real drawbacks and simply continue to add perks and abilities to your control. This involves much less strategy and makes massive cultural development all the more tantalizing (particularly since cultural victory is achieved much easier in this game than in Civ IV). While this does seem to make things easier, it is also worth noting that production victory (via the space program) and military victory have also been streamlined. Most enjoyably, the UI is radically improved and provides substantial feedback. Rather than the high learning curve of previous games that often required hours studying the in-game encyclopedia or reading strategy guides on the Net, now the game itself tells you everything you need to know. If you want to build certain buildings or achieve certain goals, the in-game UI will tell you what you need to produce to attain what you want. The cluttered menus of the past are gone in-game and everything is laid out sensibly. The city screen in particular is much easier to use compared to the arcane and awkward management of Civ IV. In Civ V you will feel like each of your cities is worth something. Corruption, starvation, and other nuisances like public health are either nonexistant or so minor in nature as to not be particularly troublesome to all but the most dedicated of warmonger on the highest difficulty. Overall the game is easier to play and it does have intriguing diversions, like city-states (minor Civs that you can become allies with and earn bonuses from) but seems to possess much less strategic depth than its predecessors. Nevertheless, the radically improved UI makes it much more enjoyable to play as a casual game. One thing I am disappointed by is that the CPU takes a long time to consider its moves. A Huge game in Civ V is almost unplayable whereas in Civ IV it ran without a hitch! Make sure you bring a good processor to the table if you plan to play very many massive games.

Don’t waste your money. I didn’t listen to the reviews on here and tried it anyway…. It locks up about once every 2 to 10 minutes and the only way to recover is to reset your mac. This game is a huge waste of money on OS X.

I love this game! Unfortunately the app constantly crashes for no reason and I lose all my progress. It gets worse as more of the map is revealed. The game is almost unplayable at this point which is a shame. If paying $90 for a game you can’t finish sounds appealing to you, then by all means download and enjoy. I find it a little too frustrating and wish I didn’t buy the game and the expansions. Boo.

I can no longer get a full game in … it bugs out and quits the game. Please fix these errors!

I actually first purchased this physically when it first came out a few years ago. I bought it brand new from Best Buy, but when I took it home with me and tried to install it, I was told the license on the package was already in use. I contacted Steam and they were rude and said I had to prove I bought the game new, and clearly thought I had pirated my copy. I followed their steps (which made the game unreturnable) and they very curtly told me to buy another license. I told the gamemakers my story with Steam and showed them the receipt of purchase and they were very kind and gave me a license to play the previous game for free, so I played that instead. But it was on Steam, and I was fed up with Steam and ended up deleting Steam and IV as well. But I remembered the gamemaker’s kindness, and when I realized a few years later that V was available on the Apple store, I jumped on it! I played Civ II over and over as a kid, but wasn’t too impressed with IV for various reasons. I liked the app, though, so tried getting this. Very very pleased with the hexagonal tiles, the graphics, the improvements, etc. I love the music and play this before bedtime, because even when I’m wiping out other civilizations it’s so darn relaxing. So if you were like me and had a bad Steam experience, or didn’t find its predecessor that great, give this a try! I’m definitely going to be buying the expansion packs and I am really looking forward to playing VI, which improves on my one big problem with V, which is the inability to stack military units. Other than that, this has been a great experience getting back into one of my old favorites!

The game does not start at all.

Having grown up playing Civ, I really enoy this version of the game, with the gameplay having some fun new quirks. However, have had big instability issues running the game, where the game becomes unresponsive.

This game has such excellent graphics that it outpaces my tricked out MacBook Pro, and there are endless grey squares on the screen that have to fill in each time you move to another part of the map. As such, a “tiny” world is the only one worth playing on, because there are very few grey spots. Every other map gets really frustrating really quickly. Because of this frustration, I’d never played a game through until today. I finished a “tiny” map game…or so I thought. I had configured the setting to allow scientific and military victories only. Well, guess what? I was two cities away from conquering my last enemy when I was informed that I lost the game for no specified reasons, but could take “one more turn.” Annoyed and taken out of the world, I hit “one more turn” to see what would happen. Well, it gave me a few more turns to keep battling it out before it announced that I had won the game…I HAD NOT CONQUERED THE LAST CIVILIZATION YET! So, with only turns left to go before I conquered my last foe, I was yet again ripped from the excitement and told some ridiculous game outcome….I decided I hit “one more turn” again so that I could finish the job. Guess what happened when I anexed the last city of the last civilization or city-state standing? NOTHING. No fanfare. The game didn’t even end. I was just ushered on to the next action it thought I should attend to (selecting production in a city). I feel betrayed by this end-game ridiculousness, given all the time (and money) I’ve put into this game. If that’s how it ends, then this just isn’t worth it. I won’t play again. I decided to get Civ IV. I hope it’s better. If I’d known any of this, I wouldn’t have bothered, so I hope this review is helpful to others like me. Other CONS: - No unit stacking = long, tedious moving and waiting rather than exciting warfare - The technology tree just ends with a pointless and nondescript “Future Technology” discovery…that you discover over and over again. To make matters worse, the quote that you see over and over again is a really stupid and uninteresting George W. Bush quote. Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with for the mysterious future you’re not creative enough to imagine us into? - Forced treaty obedience. Once you agree to a peace treaty, don’t think you can break that thing. - Stronger limitations by resources. Sometimes you can only build maybe 2 or 3 out of 15 available units because you’re lacking resources like oil, uranium, or aluminum. Some of this is interesting, but this game just takes it too far. Too much realism isn’t fun. - Workers STILL can’t be programmed to attend to a single task and wait for it to appear. This is why I stopped playing Civ before, because cleaning up pollution required you to individiiually select and direct an army of workers each and every turn. It’s even worse now, becuase, of course, there’s no unit stacking, which means theres no combining the efforts of different workers. - Mysterious glowing green orbs in the middle of the ocean with no labels. I spent half a game worrying they were enemy submarines…but I’ve never seen them do anything but glow rhythmically. - No fully customizable civilization. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to name my leader and my civ, but I can’t choose the picture I want to use for my leader and combine it with selecting colors for the civ and its individual special abilities (even just selecting from a few different categories of options like you get to when you’re founding a religion would be nice). - Space technology and pursuits are all but divorced from other kinds of advancements. That’s really unrealistic. - I think I saw a space ship take off from one of my cities from the corner of my eye. Why wasn’t I told, and why wasn’t there fanfare? - The Civopedia doesn’t include enough information. After building certain air units, I’d discover they couldn’t attack anything. After building different kinds of naval units, I’d discover that some could only attack other naval units. That’s pretty basic information that should be made clear. I just stopped building air units; what’s the fun in that? - No customizable maps (i.e., you can’t do that great Civ 3 thing where you can build your own map from the ground up), and the options for customizing maps are really basic, even in the advanced settings. Not good enough. - There aren’t enough wonders to build. PROS: - Customizable name of leader and civ (but not civ or leader image). - “Giant Death Robot” is a lot of fun (though its name is a bit lazy, and why not include some robot variety?) - I enjoy how your choices about the priority of your religion (in the expansion) can enhance different buildings. - Cities are difficult to capture, because they have strong defenses in their own right. - Cities can defend themselves with a range attack once per turn. - Hex play is fun.

I was a long-time fan of the original AoE franchise and have really missed that style of game. Civ V has absolutely met and exceeded my expectations. Reading other reviews, I had concerns that it would be unstable on Yosemte. I’ve now gone through all the tutorials and am about 300 turns into my first real game over the course of several days with numerous saves and restarts. There was one crash while first loading a saved game, but it loaded just fine on an immediate restart. Aside from that one time, the game has run flawlessly.

Awesome. Game added years of new playing time for me with the new religion aspect of the game. And my game doesnt freeze any more which is nice.

I love this game very much, but I was wondering if you guys could make a scenario pack of WW1 or WW2 like R.E.D. I say it again, a great game, just wondering if you could add those.

I love this game!!! my brother got me in to the civ games with I was 11. I thought they were cool and all but now that I am much older I love games like this. If you enjoy games with good action, building, history and strategy this is the game for you. The grapics arn’t as good as they are in the pictures, I’m playing a mac book Air thats only 2 mounths old so that was a bit of a disappointment but over all it amazing!!!!!!! Its on sale for 9.99, I got it 2 days go so Its like $40.00 NORMALLY SO GET IT NOW WHILE it is cheap. this game is worth it I can’t wait till civ 6 and I’ll probly get civilzation beyond earth when its on sale. Oh and by the way here is the biggest problem…It is addicting. Not a good game to play if you have school work to do but good to pplay when done. I hope this helps.I highly recomend that you by the polynesian DLC, its my favorite and it is really good to play as if its a sea based map. BUY THIS GAME!

If you are into strategy games, this version has a lot of options to explore. If you just play the default mode, you may get frustrated since there is a turn “limit” as well as definitions of victory pre-set in the options. Explore changing the options, especially turning off the default settings. While the game is entertaining, it is becoming somewhat predictable and also has some response issues and other quirks. I have tried the Hugh map option with only three main characters. The game definitely can overwhelm even a new Mac Pro if most of the world has become developed. Lack of game response can become very annoying, especially as the game can get out-of-sync with your mouse clicks and you wind up sending a worker to the other side of the world when you were trying to send your battleship. One option might be to turn off animation of individual units, but this would seem to lessen the whole experience. Late in the game you also start having cities starving with no means to increase the farms in their immediate areas. I still haven’t figured this one out. It doesn’t make sense to have cities linked by rail/trade and have issues of food availability within your domain, not when you are also launching rockets into space. Lastly, you must wage war at some point to survive. This is OK and requires developing strategy of how to actually wage war and win battles. What is very bothersome, however, is the pairing of different units and damge inflicted in confrontations. Somehow bows and arrows inflicting severe damage on a state of the art battle tank is just plain ridiculous. It is apparent the software is simply using the same code to determine outcomes between units even as the supposed sophistication of weaponry and modern warfare develop in the game. This seems a major flaw and really detracts and lessens the games experience once you reach the modern era. In fairness I have not tried the multi-player option and have not explored a wide range of combinations of play available through the options/settings.

I love the game…I’ve been a fan since the original. What I’m noticing on my Mac is that it periodically freezes the entire computer up, and you end up with the pinwheel of death. The only way out is to power down the laptop and restart. Make sure you save often because of this!!! Other than that, the game is just as good as prior games. If that hiccup could just be fixed, I’d give 5 stars!

This is a lovely game but I think I have a couple of improvements that could be made. 1. Any of the writings found by the Archeologists should get the same voice over treatment as the Writers works 2. The Empire State Building, Mount Rushmore, St Basils, and the Giant Buddah of Leshan should all be in the game as Built Wonders 3. On Earth setting the seas, oceans and the largest lake should be labeled 4. The Great People should have a little biography about them when you click on them 5. Mount Everest should be a Natural Wonder so should the Grand canyon and the Marianas Trench in the Ocean as well as Victoria Falls 6. All of the National Wonders should have gotten the same voice over and quote as the rest of the Wonders since it is a bit of a pain to make them when you are trying to get as many cities going as possible especially the Circus Maximus 7. Really the resources of Ivory and Whales really should be removed in favor of other kinds of resources given that both are hunted despite many endangered statuses. It feels in poor taste. 8. The brazilwood camps should have been added to the main protion of the game.

they dont let you have many options to progress the game forward at any kind of pace unless you use military. still a lot of fun glad i got this game over sims. this is more like command and conquer without a obvious villain.

I have played Civilization for over 15 years now and many different platforms/devices. It has been my all time favorite game title. I love the complexity of the game and how there are numerous ways to victory. Reliability has never been an issue for any of the Civ games I have played, except the iPad multi-player version. The only complaint that i can say about this game is there is too large of a jump in difficulty between normal and the next level up. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it extremely hard to win the game in the level above prince. The AI is too strong in every facet of the game and it becomes more of a challenge just to survive. Otherwise, it is extremely addicting and challenging.

Awesome, intense, strategic, the full package. Of all the strategy games I have this is the best.