Enable Retina Resolution on Civilization VI for iPad

Civilization VI is one of the greatest strategy games for any platform, and one of the most convenient ways to play is on the iPad.

There is, however, an issue with the graphics.

By default, the game runs in a non-retina resolution. Possibly to have a consistent performance and battery life baseline on a wide variety of iPads and iPhones.

There is a way to enable retina resolution and it makes a big difference in the readability and playability of the game.

Some comparison GIFs below:

Notice how much clearer the smaller text is, such as “MELEE STRENGTH”.

All the text in this comparison is much sharper

The small numbers (16, 60, and 20 in this screenshot) change from a blurred blob to something much clearer. Also notice the red crabs icon, and how much sharper the Knight model is rendered.

Things you need

• iPad
• USB cable
• A Mac or Windows PC.

Instructions (Mac)

The instructions below are run on MacOS Sequoia 15.0, but should work on slightly older versions too.

Step 1: Plug in your iPad and select it in the Finder

Plug in your iPad and select it from the sidebar of Finder.

You might need to unlock the iPad.

Step 2: Drag AppOptions.txt to your Desktop

In the Finder, open the Files tab and expand the “Civ VI” folder.

Drag the file named “AppOptions.txt” onto your Desktop.

Step 3: Enable Retina and Debug Menu

From your Desktop, open the AppOptions.txt file in TextEdit or another text editor and edit the following lines:

Retina 0— change to — Retina 1

and (optionally)

EnableDebugMenu 0 — change to — EnableDebugMenu 1

Step 4: Transfer back to iPad

Save and close the text file. You can then drag it back to your iPad. Be sure that you see the following dialog box and select Replace.

Step 6: Verify

Reload the game on your iPad. The game should immediately render in retina resolution.

Step 7 (bonus): Reduce UI Scaling

You can stop at this point if you like.

However, you might find that the interface covers up much of the map and units. For a less cluttered look, you can use the hidden debug menu to reduce the UI Scaling, but there are 2 caveats to this:

1: You will need an external keyboard to do this, for example the Magic Keyboard

2: The game doesn’t remember the setting, so you will need to do this every time you launch the game.

Since you enabled the Debug menu, you can type out the following command. You’ll need to do it blindly since the game gives no visual feedback:

` ui scale 2

Detailed instructions:

• Type out the backtick character, ` which might be in varying places depending on your local keyboard layout.
• After the backtick, type out ui, space,scale, space, and your desired zoom, for example 2 . I’ve personally found 1.7 or 1.8 perfect. So I just type out `ui scale 1.8.
• Press Enter / return.
• If that doesn’t work, depending on your language settings, you might need to use the tilde character ~

Comparison of 3 zoom levels: default, 2, and 1.7: