Playing Civilization V on Linux
Table of Contents
I'm not really much of a gamer anymore but Civilization V is one of my favorite games of all time and I've got over 1,000 hours in it over over the course of 10 years as of writing this.
I used to play it on a macOS but now I use Linux and have encountered a couple issues which I will document the fixes for here.
1. Random Crashes
Playing Civ 5 on my desktop computer I encountered seemlying random
crashes after about 30-60 minutes of play. I did some research and
apprently this is a known issue where the Linux port of the game will
crash if the number of CPU threads in use goes over 8. I have an Intel
i5-12600KF CPU which has 16 threads. The fix is to edit the
~/.local/share/Aspyr/Sid\ Meier\'s\ Civilization\ 5/config.ini and
change the value of MaxSimultaneousThreads from 8 to however many
threads your CPU has, so I changed it to 16. I have not had anymore
crashes since.
2. Game Minimizes when Focusing on a Different Window
Super annoying issue if you have a dual monitor setup. So I was playing Civ 5 on one monitor and had a video on the other monitor, and every single time I focused on the video, Civ 5 on my other monitor would minimize. This might be an issue for other Steam games too.
To fix it, you need to change the launch properties but right clicking
the game in your Steam llibrary, going to properties > set launch
options and add SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS=0 %command%. After
doing this and restarting the game, the issue went away.
