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Antti Halme edited this page Jun 14, 2026 · 4 revisions

Notes for those looking to run OpenCiv3 or do OpenCiv3 development on a Mac.

Overview

As of 2026, Civ3 runs fairly well on Apple Silicon (M1, M2, ...), and OpenCiv3 runs even better. Intel Macs may also get the job done.

...but in each case some assembly may be required.

Civ3

In order to do development work on OpenCiv3, it's useful to have a working Civ3 instance. At the very least you'll want to have the assets from the original game.

The recommend guide for getting Civ3 running on your Mac is to follow this guidance:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/installing-playing-and-modding-c3c-on-apple-silicon.681540/

In essence, the current recommended combo is:

  • "Sid Meier's Civilization® III Complete" from Good Old Games (GOG) (<$5) (the non-Galaxy version)
  • PortingKit Wineskin tailored for Civ3 (free)
  • PlayIntro=0 and KeepRes=1 settings set in Conquests.ini

As per PortingKit (instructions for Civ3), you'll want the non-Galaxy download, "Offline backup setup files" from GOG.

Note that for the time being Steam versions of Civ3 are NOT recommended for Mac, as there are a few more hurdles to overcome with that route.

Troubleshooting

For general Civ3 troubleshooting, try the Civ3 Macintosh -channel at CivFanatics Forum.

Ambient sound looping

Depending on the version wine that PortingKit makes use of, you may still encounter some audio issues. If you find that the Hawk's cry ambient sfx gets "stuck", a simple workaround is to replace the audio file with a silent one. Make a copy of /<civ3>/Sounds/Ambience Sfx/Hawk.wav and try this on for size:

Hawk_silent.wav

cd <MyPortingKitAppsHome/MyCiv3.app>
cd Contents/drive_c/GOG\ Games/Civilization\ III\ Complete/Sounds/Ambience\ Sfx/
mv ~/Downloads/Hawk_silent.wav .
mv Hawk.wav Hawk_og.wav
mv Hawk_silent.wav Hawk.wav

OpenCiv3

Running OpenCiv3 on a Mac

TBW

Troubleshooting

HiDPI

Civ3 is an old game, and at least for the time being OpenCiv3 will suffer from the same asset limitations as the original game.

Specifically, Civ3 has fixed-sized low-resolution assets. In order to make use of these assets, or same-scale replacements for them, the game's native resolution has to be quite low. As such, with any adjustments, the game will natively render as a tiny viewport on high pixel density screens (HiDPI).

Running a low-resolution game on a high-resolution computer will always be less than ideal, but we can make the game playable by dynamically scaling the visuals at runtime. This can be done either 1) in-engine, by having Godot the scaling, or 2) by having the host platform do the scaling.

OpenCiv3 is currently set to do in-engine scaling (see [https://github.com/C7-Game/OpenCiv3/pull/939]).

If you want to try things out with host platform managed scaling, you can set NSHighResolutionCapable=false in OpenCiv3.app/Contents/Info.plist with the following change (thanks njy for the fix):

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
-<true/>
+<false/>

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