There are many quick keys in the game but what are your favorite?

My top 3 are...

1. "SHIFT + Select" when choosing buildings or units in the city.

2. "ALT + Select" when wanting to make a unit over and over. This works great for spamming religions and corporation units.

3. "CTRL + A" Abandon City is great for deleting those buildings you just don't like or deleting a city that's not profitable to you but you don't want the enemy to take over.

Later on I like to create (large) army-groups (as well as fleet and airforce) that are bound together by Strg + Number (just like in good old C & C). Once you press the number your force is focussed.

For example if you tend to pacify a area of barbs/partisans, your army corps swarms out to the different targets. Once the job is done, the remaining troops are concentrated again by Number + Click on a tile (city).
Saves some time, sometimes.

ALT+X and CTRL+X, great help for choosing the city plots you want to use for your settlers.

I'm with Zappara, I use Alt-X a LOT to lay out my cities. I like to use Alt-S to make notes to remind myself of what I was doing when I leave and come back later to a game. Helps me to remember which cities I've frozen growth on to recheck and get going again. I hate it when I stop a city for happiness, change civics later and forget I've stopped growth!

How exactly do you assign a group to a number? That sounds interesting.

@Hydromancerx: I am glad that you made this thread. There are a bunch of Hotkeys I didn't know about. I knew about ALT+X but not CTRL+X- adding this to my top used ones. I knew about ALT+S but never really used it- I probably will now for like Carwyn said, to leave notes in between games. And finally, CTRL+A to destroy buildings...awesome! I never knew about that one- I knew it was possible, somehow to destroy cities but never figured it out.

Anyone know what the shortcut to release a city?

I'm with Zappara, I use Alt-X a LOT to lay out my cities. I like to use Alt-S to make notes to remind myself of what I was doing when I leave and come back later to a game. Helps me to remember which cities I've frozen growth on to recheck and get going again. I hate it when I stop a city for happiness, change civics later and forget I've stopped growth!

How exactly do you assign a group to a number? That sounds interesting.
Select the units you want to group then press CTRL+#. Replace # with a number from 1 through 9. It looks like you can't have one unit in more than one group. The older grouping is removed.

@damunzy Do CTRL + A and in the list is Abandon city.

Anyone know what the shortcut to release a city?


F1 and there in the lower right corner of the window is a red fist, when clicking on it, it shows cities to form colony or liberate to civ X, you can do it in diplo mode too, if you wanna gift a city to civX.

CTRL + A - Abandon City
Helps unclutter cities by "selling" obsolete buildings and allows removal of stupidly placed AI cities I conquered without the Diplomatic penalty (I no do the latter due to Realistic Diplomacy since it feels like cheating).