Micromanage without hand pain?

Rjpkool24

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 19, 2012
Messages
9
Does anyone have tips or things they do to avoid the pain in the hand that comes with micromanaging workers..artillery, or constantly changing what you want a city to produce? I avoid playing on anything bigger then standard because of this and despite playing the game for many years this often drives me to quitting
 
Does anyone have tips or things they do to avoid the pain in the hand that comes with micromanaging workers..artillery, or constantly changing what you want a city to produce? I avoid playing on anything bigger then standard because of this and despite playing the game for many years this often drives me to quitting

Do you know how to move stacks? Here's something I do. When I reach the industrial era and pollution starts outbreaking. I pick up a great lump of workers and drop them on the polluted tile, then click the requisite number of times, then pick up what's left and drop them on the next one and so on. This assumes everything railed and no movement cost. When at peace you can automate a bunch of them to 'clear damage'. Unfortunately, in war time, they tend to wander towards the front line heedless of danger and get caught.

I will try to think of some more. I doubt very much whether anyone here will encourage you to trust the governor or automation except to a very limited extent.
 
I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but using all the keyboard shortcuts might help. Speeds things up and halves the mouse clicks needed. There's info around here for all of them, but those I use most are:

J-move stack
G- go to
B- bomb (artillery and planes)
M- mine
I- Irrigate
N- Forest
Shift C- Clear jungle, marsh, forest or pollution
F- Fortify

You can also set a build queue by Shift-clicking what you want to put in the build list - convenient when you want the same thing multiple times or are starting new cities with a set building plan.
 
CivAssistII is of great help. For me it reduces the time necessary for micro management approximately to one 10th!

Can you tell us some of its best uses? I have been using it since starting the demigod thread and it's great but i am sure i am not using it to full effect.
 
In addition to the automation shortcuts others have mentioned, it may be worth considering what hardware you are using, as that may be exacerbating the issue. You didn't mention if it was pain in the mouse hand or the keyboard hand, which makes it a bit tougher to make recommendations (keyboard shortcuts won't help if it's the keyboard hand that has the issue, for example).

But there are ergonomic keyboards and mice that are specifically designed to reduce repetitive-stress injury and pain from excessive use. While I don't personally have experience with any of these, I've heard from people who do use them for their intended purpose that they can be well worth the cost. If it's the mouse hand that's having issues, trackballs may be worth considering as well as more ergonomic mice.
 
I don't do a lot of micromanagement on the city screen -- telling workers which tiles to work. At the beginning of the game, yes, when it is crucial to keep cities with flood plains from growing too fast or to maximize shield production for a particular wonder. But later in the game, when I have a lot of cities, I get them set up to a comfortable size and just let them go.

After the railroads are done, I use the goto command and send all the slave workers to a tile near my capital. Right-click, fortify all. When some pollution pops up, right-click, wake all. Shift-D several times to send them off to clean up the orange goo. If one group finishes early, they will scurry over to the next orange spot and work on it. When they're all done, use the stack command to bring them back to the assembly point. As walletta notes, this is risky during war time. The craters from bombs or artillery when you're blowing up the enemy's resources are also considered "damage", and so the workers will try to repair that, too. Even in the crossfire!

I will also move my mouse hand to the keyboard and use the arrow keys on the numeric keypad for short unit movements -- to vary the motions of my mouse hand, and reduce the number of clicks.
 
J-move stack

Also, I think it's either control-J or shift-J to stack move only units of the same type. Very important to avoid stack-moving your cavs and workers at the worker rate, for example.
 
Be happy for every city and unit that you have to manage each turn. It means that you're powerful, and Civilization doesn't have a time limit.
 
turn off the animations of human movements, speeds up the game a whole lot

I can see turning off your movement animations but I need to see enemy movements to know what they are planning. They usually tend to telegraph aggressive plans.
 
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