On Steam, Civilization V is available as a SteamPlay title--meaning purchasing the game for either PC or Mac will give you free access to both platforms. Unlike the PC version of Civilization V, the Mac version does not support SteamCloud for game saves; however, the porting team at Aspyr Media says a patch to add the feature will launch "soon after the Civilization V Mac release." Save games will not be accessible between platforms.

User-created mods are also getting the boot from Civ V's Mac release, "User mods would require us to build custom versions of the full application ourselves in order to support a limited number of specific mods and still leave others unsupported," Aspyr wrote in an FAQ on its blog. Also noted as an issue were current mod tools being implemented with Microsoft.NET, making porting impossible.

"Bottom line: There is no way to create a Mac experience that allows for a good end-user experience for user-created mods," the dev wrote. "Believe us--we tried." Minimum system requirements for the Mac version of Civilization V are available after the break.

Minimum System Requirements on Mac
• Operating System: 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard)
• CPU Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (Dual-Core)
• CPU Speed: 2.4 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Hard Disk Space: 8 GB
• Video Card (ATI): Radeon HD2600
• Video Card (NVidia): Geforce 8600
• Video Memory (VRam): 256 MB
• Media Required: DVD-ROM (Physical, boxed copies only)
• Peripherals: Macintosh mouse and keyboard