MY CIV 4 GAMES TAKE FOREVER!

(and I'm pretty mad about it)

Especially this most recent one where I'm trying for a domination victory and I've had to eliminate all but 1 other civ.

Incidentally, I should mention that I'm basically playing with a Cottage economy, with 1 city devoted to money (with a shrine and wall street) and 1 city devoted to science (with an academy and Oxford). So I'm not talking about an SE here (though I've tried that and it is certainly slower still). I play on Noble level, with all the victory conditions. My current game, I'm playing the Incans (obviously OP, first time trying them), on fractal, standard sized map and speed.

Anybody have any advice on how to play faster (and still win)?

I'm looking for suggestions like "use rally points", not "don't be a moron". :-D

-marick

Play on a small map.

How long are your games? I play epic and they take 3-5 hours normally. If that's too slow for you I can't help, if it isn't then I can.

How long are your games? I play epic and they take 3-5 hours normally. If that's too slow for you I can't help, if it isn't then I can.

Thats damn fast...

DaveMcW:

A small map is a good suggestion, but I tried that and just got completely crushed by my neighbors. Any pointers on what I should do differently on a smaller map?

TheMeInTeam:

3-5 hours! Yeah, if I could drop to that long, it would be perfect. I could play a 3-5 hour game in an evening or 2.

As it is, it usually takes me about 4 or 5 nights to play a full game. 12-15 hours.

At that pace, I've only completed one victory (Spaceship) and I'm working on my 2nd (domination, probably 2 more hours to go, having played about 10).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

A small map is a good suggestion, but I tried that and just got completely crushed by my neighbors. Any pointers on what I should do differently on a smaller map?
Build 4 cities 6 workers, then switch to warmonger mode and capture the rest.

Don't sweat it, I usually take about 30 hrs on epic, with BUG.

My games would be in the 10-20 hour range, although if I play the game differently, it's less.

Try a Wonderspam or OOC game?

DMOC, others:

Interesting. So it sounds like 10+ hours for a game isn't actually particularly slow. I guess that just means I'm in the 10+ hour group.

I'm curious, though, if there's some average or something. Maybe I'll put up a poll.

-marick

A win on normal speed usually takes like 15-20 hours for me, unless it's something weird like a cultural win.

As you get better at the game, your decision-making gets faster, but you also find new things to focus your attention on, so I haven't noticed my games getting much shorter so far.

I found a number of things drastically cut the time for me:

1. I turned off battle animations. With all the massive warring I do on occasion, this is a huge time saver. I liked watching it at first but it's only fun to watch for so long :).

2. "I" for farm. "K" for workshop. "T" for cottage. "r" for road. There's tons and tons of these. The ones I use the most are long since memorized.

3. I thought city micro would slow me down too much, but actually once you get used to the patterns of doing it, it really doesn't. It takes me about 5 seconds to enter a city screen and swap tiles around or run specialists on average. This is also true for not automating workers...once you get used to the kinds of improvements you put in each place and what food yield will support hammer/cottage/specialist wise you can make improvement decisions lightning fast based on how you want to specialize a city. Most of this stuff is just memorized patterns.

4. IMO strategic level decisions are the most important, and where the most time should be spent. You only need a minute or so to think out many of them, but whether going buddhist or hindu, and whether you can attack this AI now are big, game breaking considerations. In many cases picking up a wonder vs expanding is like that also. I have some general rules that I follow, but really you have to play the map here, there's no other way.

Part of going fast is just a mindset thing too. I played this fast from the beginning, and made so many mistakes it isn't funny (making mids and not switching to rep, forgetting that I had a city set to auto-queue units, forgetting I could make oxford, etc). I didn't care and kept going the same rate until I just made those kinds of mistakes less. I still make them, because I'm still learning as I go up in difficulty (Emperor being my limit for now, the only Immortal game I tried was about a month or two ago and I got killed).

That reminds me, queuing up city production is very helpful too. This is especially true of cities making units during war. If you have a stable GG city that you want making triple-promoted knights constantly, there's no reason not to alt-click the knights to make it do it...just don't forget you did that :).

Something I'm exploring is hotkey queuing. You can actually order a set of buildings or units in a certain order and save it. If I can get that going correctly I'll be even faster, because that would let you just click on a city and press a number to have it build exactly what you want (it will ignore stuff you've built or can't build yet, so you could easily run hot keys like market/grocer/bank or library/university/observatory/lab). I already do this with units in-game a lot to make troop mixes with less effort.

I didn't do this because I pretty much try to move as fast as possible without even consciously thinking of it, but it might help: Force a turn limit on yourself timewise. 30 seconds to a minute or something. I have very, very few turns that take longer than that (the only ones I can think of would be something like a civic swap into caste system when running SE, or similar major scale changes that require micro of nearly every city).

1. I turned off battle animations. With all the massive warring I do on occasion, this is a huge time saver. I liked watching it at first but it's only fun to watch for so long .
When I did this it cut my game times from around six hours to four. Definitely do this.

The only problems I have had with turning of battle animations is that the attacks without them are so fast that I've been in situations where I've had one of my stacks wiped out without being able to get a good grasp of what the enemy troop -composition looked like. So I'm usually playing with animations for defense only. I suppose I could easilly toggle this though, most of the time you're not in danger of losing an entire stack after all. :)

I didn't do this because I pretty much try to move as fast as possible without even consciously thinking of it, but it might help: Force a turn limit on yourself timewise. 30 seconds to a minute or something. I have very, very few turns that take longer than that (the only ones I can think of would be something like a civic swap into caste system when running SE, or similar major scale changes that require micro of nearly every city).

I suppose this could be useful if you absolutely have to finish up a game quickly for some reason but I have a hard time seeing the point of going as fast as possible just to go as fast as possible. Unless that's what makes CIV a fun game for you.
And we all know that each city should be microed every turn. ;)

Hotkey your workers et al early. Cycle through them early, cycle through all your cities.

I suppose this could be useful if you absolutely have to finish up a game quickly for some reason but I have a hard time seeing the point of going as fast as possible just to go as fast as possible. Unless that's what makes CIV a fun game for you.
And we all know that each city should be microed every turn. ;)

I doubt I'll micro cities every turn ever :lol:.

The above is just practice to get used to the patterns of things that are relatively routine, such as running scientists when you finish libraries etc, and moving stacks around quickly. It's not something someone HAS to do, but if they want to go faster without drastically damaging their game play, that's probably the fastest way to learn, even if they will take their lumps while learning how.

Turning of battle animations was a useful tip. I will most certainly try that, though I do like to watch them but it'll certainly make late game warring a whole lot less time consuming. As it is today I quit too many games I know I've won because the final phase takes too long.

On average I'm between 10-15 hours as it is now, marathon speed, mostly normal or small maps.

Another nice little tool that cuts down micromanaging a bit and has saved me alot of time is the "Bug Mod". I would really like to recommend this helpful little thing which will give you the info you need (IE, City X will grow to size y next turn, City Z will become unhealthy next turn, etc). Thus you don't have to go through all your cities every 10th turn or so to check if there's some managing needed.

Before Bug mod I think I had a marathon game on a normal map to take something like 20 hours. Bug certainly cut that time a bit and some of the time was cut because I became better at the game and decisions took a shorter time.

Play normal - quick speed
Play smaller maps
Play an One City Challenge game for a change

Why does it matter how long a game takes as long as it's fun? :confused:

There is also the advanced start feature. I haven't used it because I enjoy the early game, but its possible to start in any era.

Why does it matter how long a game takes as long as it's fun? :confused:

It's only fun to a point. My games tend to go about a week before I quit them. I can't play every night and when I do it's only for an hour or two at the most. I imagine I could finish a game in 15-20 hours, but I can't really remember the last game I've finished. After the middle ages I can usually tell whether the game is won or lost and I really don't have the drive to go another week or two just to see my score. It's not completely satisfying, but another way to shorten your games is to just quit halfway through and start a new one. :D

If think you should go up a level or two. A year or two ago I had the same problem... games usually decided by 1500 or so and I even imagined it was challenging until then, when in fact my victory was never seriously endangered. But then I realized that it was just too easy. Nowadays on Emperor (occasionally Immortal but with little success so far) I have to slowly work my way from the bottom of the scoreboard. Usually I can only take the lead (not neccessarily the lead in score, but where it matters) by 1800 or even later.

Everybody:
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I am now convinced that I'm actually not that much slower than most of you, so no need to continue this unless you have some great ideas. My recent victory was in 13 hours, and that doesn't actually sound too much longer than most of yours.

As for why I care that my games take a long time, it's simply because 13 hours is way too long for multiplayer with my friend who plays a lot faster.

If a game is fun, it doesn't matter how long it takes when you're playing alone. When you start trying to play with other people, though (as I plan to soon), there's a big difference between 1-minute turns (3-5 hour game) and 3-minute turns (10-15 hour game) in terms of how fun the game is for the other person, especially if they spend 2 of those 3 minutes twiddling their thumbs.

TheMeInTeam:

Thanks for the helpful suggestions. I'll investigate queueing and try to learn all those keyboard shortcuts. I also like your idea of just forcing myself to play faster and deal with it if something goes wrong (I mean, I can always reload from the auto-save).

-marick

p.s. oh, someone suggested starting later in time, but I don't want to do that because I enjoy the early rush.

Playing slowly doesn't have to be a "problem". It only is if you get the feeling that it takes the fun out of your games.

I've found in the past that pondering too much over city placement and build decisions made my games worse because I lost track and focus and couldn't keep the big picture in mind.

If you think you need to speed up your play, you would have to enter the game with a clear picture in your mind about what your going to do. If your plan is, for example, "expand quickly, then go to war", then just do that. Don't think about every single building and perfect city spots, go chop out those Settlers and Workers and settle the best locations quickly. Then build Barracks and the few essentials and units.

At the end of the day, some of us just play more slowly because it is their nature. I'm definitely a slow player by nature so I could never mop up an Epic game in 5 hours, even if I forced myself to. I would just make too many mistakes and have the constant feeling that I "missed" something, and that would be no fun at all for me.

Civ is a round based strategy game, and your real time taken is not accounted for AT ALL. A 150k win is a great achievement, even if it took you 30 hours played time.

something else that you can do in the options is check Quick moves, do not show enemy movement, quick battle (offense)/defense. Turning off a lot of the animations helps

What is the slowest part of your game? When you start you want to optimize every tile your city works and every terrain improvement your workers do, but towards the end you should focus only on victory:

1) If going for domination, set all useless cities to build gold or science. No point in building building in cities that will take 100 turns to be productive.
War can take a long time, but when your advantage is obvious, don't try to micro manage.
Use Ctrl+# to number your stack of doom. You don't need more than 3. Use stack attack to capture cities. Don't attack with your units one by one, and disable combat animations.
If you need to use transport, use at least 4~5 at a time so that you don't have to manage to much. It might be a bit less efficient but you can afford it when you have a definite advantage, which is not too hard to get on Noble.

2) If going for diplomatic, destroy all your improvements and farm over everything to increase population
3) If going for space, you only need about 10 cities to build SS parts. The rest can build science. Your workers should be ready to convert your empire to workshops so you can produce better
4) If going for culture, you really need to just cottage 3 cities and build lots of cathedrals, while farming GA in 1~2 additional cities. Most of the time you just press enter.

EDIT: now I see that the reason you are asking is multiplayer - that is a different problem. I like to sometimes pause and think about the direction of the game, and that is difficult in a multiplayer game. I would suggest that you agree in advance that every turn has a time limit and every 20 turns or so you are allowed a 2~5 minute break.
War could take ages longer as you actually have to think and not assume an automatic behavior of the AI. I never tried civ multilayer, but my feeling is that it would be a problematic game from that aspect, so I have no practical advice for that

OCC (One City Challenge) games are great for a quick game on the side. They're immensely fun, especially on small maps and lots of opponents and raging barbs. Good for trying out a higher level too.

If you just want to save playing time, no need to change gameplay at all. Just turn off animations of enemy moves (and maybe friendly too) in the late game. On a Core 2 @ 2.13 Mhz, reduced my late game time per turn from 3-5 minutes to c. 5 seconds (plus time spent making actual decisions, which are few if you're ahead.

"I reject any form of government in which the opinion of the village idiot is given the same weight as the opinion of Aristotle."

Might do well to reject any form of government in which the opinion of Plato, Socrates, or of any of many famous political thinkers and rulers, is given the same weight as that of the village idiot.

Okay, I may be boring with all the remarks about that, but...
How, on the other hand, do you SLOW your playtime? I'm always playing Normal, Standard sized game. It takes me 2 hours to finish a game. :eek: I don't want to refrain from those settings, but the 2-hour playing time means I just don't pay a lot of attention to playing. Which means I have never won a game since last... three months? :eek:

Playing slower, eh?

Well, the basic trick to playing slower is turning off all automations, and really focusing on the actions of each of your workers, citizens, and military units. Never use a build queue. Micromanage every city all the time.

Still not slow enough? Join a succession game. :-D

-marick

When you are later in the game and are ahead by a lot, you could "automate production" in cities. I do that when i just have too much to deal with. It doesn't build buildings in the best order, but it is passable.

My tuppence worth in play-time.

Normal, Prince, Fractal, Random Leader.

Fastest victory, 2hr 5 mins - Cultural victory 1900 AD - also my highest scoring at the time. Very lucky, hit all the wonders.

Slowest victory - 16+hrs - my first domination victory (1950AD +ish) AD, and still much smaller score than the one above ;-(

Raw spaceship victories (with no/few wars & no conquest), 3hrs 40 minutes or thereabouts (weird - I have serial victories like this finish with 5 minutes of each other, some at nobel when I was learning the game).

The big time killer for me has been war, avoid that you can finish in an evening, but it gets boring after a while which then makes you play maps for dom victories even if cultural/space would get you faster win/bigger score.

War shouldn't make the game THAT much longer...I've had domination games in the 3-4 hour range. The slower ones (like going for domination or conquest on archipelago) are usually a little more than 4 though.

My record was a completely peaceful 1 hr 30 minute AP diplo win (not counting small maps etc.) My record for domination is sub 3 hour :). There's a lot of hot keys and time savers in this game that can REALLY affect its length. My war games are actually FASTER than my space games, but the fastest wins for me always seem to be diplomatic, either UN or AP...I just get to the point where I know I'm the runaway civ, and then I just get out of there with the diplo vote :).

The standard I play at (at the moment) means that all the wars are really wars - I suspect yours would more accurately be called "conquests" :D

When you are sufficiently ahead in tech or numbers to stack attack I have noticed wars take less time, but I have still yet to master the "get-a-big-army-before-the-loon-next-door-takes-you-for-lunch" aspects the this game...

So you want to play slower? Play in shorter sittings. Stop playing whenever you feel the urge to hit ENTER rather than dealing with the issues at hand in your empire. Check the city screen every few turns and make sure the computer hasn't meddled with your cities by assigning unwanted specialists. Make sure all your cities are building what you want them to build. Make sure all your workers are working optimally. Do everything manually: no governors, no automated workers. Specialize your cities early - think about how you'll use them in the future. The list goes on and on... until good habits start coming naturally, you'll get better and win more as you think about what you're doing more.