TMIT's Guide to Speed Civving

r_rolo1 said:

That is easy: Rumble a lot about borked diplo, spawnbusting, capitulation rules and nuclear plants

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Those aren't even 1/4 of my posts. They're probably far less .

Being fast at typing and having a student job that gives you a lot of free time is a big plus, although that's over now that I graduated.

r_rolo1 said:

That is easy: Rumble a lot about borked diplo, spawnbusting, capitulation rules and nuclear plants

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I would have said "by shadowing every single game ever posted on this forum, and posting a writeup of each and every shadow".

I'm lucky to get 2-3 games done per week - TMIT with speed civving and apparently more free time than me seems to pull that off in a day!

What about build queue saving?
Pressing Ctrl + [Number] in city screen to save
Then pressing [Number] again to load
And the nicest thing is that this is persistent from game to game as well

For example, I save my queue like this:
[1] - 4 x main city attacker
[2] - 4 x siege
[3] - various stack defenders (e.g. 1 x pike, 1 x mace, 1 x longbow, 1 x crossbow)
[4] - 2 x main city defender

[0] - basic infra (things that you usually want in every city anyway - e.g. monument, granary, forge, lighthouse, factory, library, market, barrack)

Tips on creating the building queue is to start a game, go into world builder to enable all tech. Then create a coastal city to generate that building queue.

Now when i start new city in game, I just hit [0]. Then maybe spend a bit of time to remove things that I may not want.

When going for war, I just put 2 cities on [1], 2 more on [2], 1 on [3], and the rest (usually cities with lower production capabilities) on [4]

Then you only have to update the key [1] - [4] when you get new major military tech.
As for the basic infra, usually you don't have to update that at all.

hunterai said:

What about build queue saving?
Pressing Ctrl + [Number] in city screen to save
Then pressing [Number] again to load
And the nicest thing is that this is persistent from game to game as well

For example, I save my queue like this:
[1] - 4 x main city attacker
[2] - 4 x siege
[3] - various stack defenders (e.g. 1 x pike, 1 x mace, 1 x longbow, 1 x crossbow)
[4] - 2 x main city defender

[0] - basic infra (things that you usually want in every city anyway - e.g. monument, granary, forge, lighthouse, factory, library, market, barrack)

Tips on creating the building queue is to start a game, go into world builder to enable all tech. Then create a coastal city to generate that building queue.

Now when i start new city in game, I just hit [0]. Then maybe spend a bit of time to remove things that I may not want.

When going for war, I just put 2 cities on [1], 2 more on [2], 1 on [3], and the rest (usually cities with lower production capabilities) on [4]

Then you only have to update the key [1] - [4] when you get new major military tech.
As for the basic infra, usually you don't have to update that at all.

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I nominate this for "Most Useful First Post of All Time"

Welcome to the forums, hunterai!

thbrown81 said:

I nominate this for "Most Useful First Post of All Time"

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W1N!!!

Very useful article TMIT. Once I learned waypoints and some of the other tips you posted here, I can never go back. Brilliant, thank you.

Thanks for the tips.
I get really bored grinding out a win later on in the game, maybe if I try this I might actually finish a game for once.


You might be interested in this article, it describes some of the real flaws that havent been addressed in Civ or other games yet. Soon hopefully

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060823/goetz_01.shtml

With waypoints, I can never get them to a place where there are units on, so i always have to make a waypoint just before a city. Does anyone know the solution to this?

I've one more tip:
You can end your turns just after you started it by clicking on the little cirkel that shows if you still have movements. I use this when I'm won anyway and I just want to skip the turns till spaceship arrives for exemple. Or when I have set all my cities to nuke and I don't want to hit sleep every turn for the nukes (I just skip 10 turns and let the nukes sleep then)

With waypoints, I can never get them to a place where there are units on, so i always have to make a waypoint just before a city. Does anyone know the solution to this?

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Make sure the city itself is not selected and you can set waypoints on it.

TheMeInTeam said:

City Tiles: This one is hard and it slows a lot of players down on a turn by turn basis. Many players check every city every turn. There's no way I could ever possibly tolerate that.

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This statement has not only increased my speed but also improved my game. Because every city should serve the empire - not the other way around. It's easy to lose sight of that when you're constantly scrolling through the city views.

If you enable "tile yields" (or whatever it's called, I play german), you can see which tiles are worked and which not. The worked ones have larger icons for toasts, hammers and coins. This way, you don't have to check inside the cities - doesn't help too much for overlapping cities, though.

OMG waypoints..... I always hoped they would exist but assumed they didn't, why the hell didn't I check that out. That WILL save me time, thanks TMIT. I will also try out the unit loops, interesting.

A few things that save me some time too :

1) Print the keyboard shortcuts and have them near you. (Training : Stop yourself from clicking at all, use the shortcuts... everytime until they become second nature.)
2) Think it through. It serves no purpose to take fast decisions if they are bad decisions... It is better to spend time thinking about the details so you can take the best decision now, and recognise the pattern later and do it faster. But if you rush it without "knowing", you will always take bad decisions. (This is important for things like city placement and tile improvements... You might spend 30 minutes on a single turn because you felt the need to come to the forums and read a couple of articles, but once you figure out the basic principles, you can move on to practicing fast play and be good at it a lot faster on the long run.)
3) A bit obvious... But use mods like BUG to access information more quickly and thus play faster.
4) If you feel you won... then win it and end the game. If you are already a superpower and can for example nuke everybody or win a UN victory, then do it. There is no reason for you to research the whole technology tree or explore the whole map in a game that you virtually won. Better to end it ASAP and start another game. (I used to do this a lot... kind of roleplaying the game by adding my personal irrelevant objectives that make the game longer than necessary. )

But most of all there is the state of mind you should be in. Playing fast means becoming a better player. To become a better player you should focus on practicing one aspect of the game until you get it right. For example imo it is better to set workers on auto if you play noble or bellow (you just don't need that edge to win on easy difficulties), and focus on other aspects of the game like warfare, learning the technology tree, and mastering all the victory conditions (the "macro" level stuff). Then once you move to prince+ you start micromanaging workers to brush up on your city and tile improvements, and work on advanced startegies like farming GP and using them efficiently, adapting your research to what the AI is doing, monitoring the diplomacy situation more closely, identifying when switching to another victory condition can get you a faster win, and so on.

Everytime you increase the difficulty level, you need to perfect a new skill, preferably in an area where you played poorly before. For me getting my city placement and tile improvement skills to a decent level let me go from noble to prince very, very easily. Right now practicing warfare should get me to monarch. In your case it might be the inverse, you might have great warfare skills already but need tile improvement and city specialization to get your gameplay to the next level, or maybe you need to better pick your technologies depending on the AI and get more from your trades with them. You need to identify where your gameplay is good and where it is bad so you know what area to practice to improve your overall gameplay, and in turn the speed at which you play your games.

Sarassin said:

A few things that save me some time too :

2) Think it through. It serves no purpose to take fast decisions if they are bad decisions... It is better to spend time thinking about the details so you can take the best decision now, and recognise the pattern later and do it faster. But if you rush it without "knowing", you will always take bad decisions.

...

For example imo it is better to set workers on auto if you play noble or bellow (you just don't need that edge to win on easy difficulties), and focus on other aspects of the game

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Interesting. It seems to me that there are not only good and bad decisions, but also important and irrelevant decisions on another axis. Could be applied to life general.

Sarassin said:

It is better to spend time thinking about the details so you can take the best decision now, and recognise the pattern later and do it faster.

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When I was younger a played at a chess club and had lessons there. The lessons were mainly focused on learning to recognize patterns which can be used to improve skill.

Very good players use this skill to play many games simultaneously against a large group of inexperienced players and win 95+% of the time.

Sarassin said:

A few things that save me some time too :

1) Print the keyboard shortcuts and have them near you. (Training : Stop yourself from clicking at all, use the shortcuts... everytime until they become second nature.)

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Long time lurker, first time caller here...

Great advice. It reminded me of my first office job and improving my use of MS Excel. Also, if you are short on space around your desk and can't keep a full sheet in handy viewing range, (it can happen, what with all the tater-chip bags and empty coffee mugs) decide for yourself a few key commands to learn at a time. Write them on a post-it note and stick it on your monitor. It's easier to move your eyes to the note (or full sheet for that matter) than it is to move the mouse to hover (in the case where the key command is shown in the tooltip). Once you get those commands down, move on to a new set, rinse/repeat. Soon you'll be flying through workbooks (or empires for that matter).


A few questions about waypoints: TMIT, I was watching one of your Let's Plays and you said something that I neglected to note down - and now I've seen most all of them and can't remember where this came from. Anyway...if you want to select all cities on a continent say, and then waypoint them to a particular city, you can't have the destination city selected to set the waypoint. You had a fast way to deselect that one city while preserving the selection of the other cities. What was that trick? I keep trying things but I don't think I ever lucked into it. Maybe it was functionality added later, as I'm trying to get solid on vanilla before moving on to the expansions? Also, know of a way to cancel all waypoints in one fell swoop? I hate it when post-war workers and missionaries follow the waypoint because I was too forgetful or lazy to cancel them all.

Shift-left click will un-select one city once they're all selected. If you select all cities then shift-right click on one, you will cancel all waypoints.

Note that similar to unit selection control, city selection control is BUGGED, and yet so few people in the world (and none in charge of any fireaxis patch) have ever seemed to care. I lost several minutes per game when it selects units I did not order it to select, selects all cities when I clicked on one, refuses to unselect units/cities, or decides I should declare on the AI just by clicking on it even if I'm not holding alt or ANY DAMN KEY ON THE KEYBOARD AT ALL (which I of course re-load, which takes even longer).

So be careful when using some of these micro controls, because although they speed up play, there's some obvious bias of attention away from the most basic element of any game in civ IV. You don't want to go whipping empire-wide because selecting a single city is the same thing as selecting them all at random.

I experienced the problems with mis-selecting getting worse the longer the client runs and the UI-lag starts to get tedious. I'm not too sure if the function is bugged or of the wrong actions are triggered because the mouse cursor lags (which is surely annoying when selecting cities). Either way, i always doublecheck.

If it wasn't mentioned, when you go to war and alt build your units click on the automate production button and the computer will automatically whip the city for you. Once I get rolling on domination I just alt click the city on the map to select all, then do *cavalry then you have to open each city individually to set the auto production - just open one then use the END key to switch between all.