I'm on Apple Silicon, not Intel. (And I'm on OS 15.8, which is two versions below the recently released OS 27.) And I'm using the ARM build. I have re-downloaded the app (in the unlikely event that the binary somehow got damaged in such a way that it still runs), and deleted the Cache folder. Are there are parameters or settings I can use in the config file that might be useful?

Do you know if you were using the vulkan or the opengl backend ? you could try running the game from the terminal with -conf:rendererbackend:vulkan or put rendererbackend=vulkan in your user.cfg

I did a search, and ai said that macos 27 dropped hardware support for intel macs, so intel macs can't go to 27. Not being able to run intel apps is going out in macos 28. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=w5ngl9k2. So, I think @benwiggy is fine

Mac recently dropped support for Intel-based apps, you can either install Rosetta or reinstall from the website using the non-intel version. This may or may not be your problem.

I'm not saying it's inaccurate, but early, that's why I proposed to leave both, and wondered if techs should visibly upgrade units. It could well be that Spartans and Athenians wouldn't have this tech (I've mentioned lots of techs in Thoughts on the Spartans that wouldn't apply to them just because currently related ones do), if their focus is only the Classical period (which is a bit funky when also fighting Hellenistic civs, but ok). After all, "the new torsion weapon does not seem to have reached fruition until the middle of the 4th century", and by the 330s BC "the torsion catapult had already appeared elsewhere, and scholars have assumed that its testing ground was Macedon, kingdom of Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great", from Campbell. Good to know the Polybolos has somehow been considered (I just play one civ at a time for months, have gone through Spartans, Athenians, and now with the Macedonians). Still, the torsion spirals seem the most pressing blunder to fix, since that's not only incorrect, but physically impossible (hoplites with rectangular shields would make more sense ).