How to decrease the time a game takes?

[DMOC]

howdy fellow fanatics,

I have a problem and it is about how long my games take. I usually have one or two evenings per week (ca. 4hrs per evening) to play Civ4. I would love to be able to start and finish (and hopefully win ) one game per evening. From what I read in the forums, 4hrs should be ample time to do so (at "regular" settings, i.e. small/standard maps, normal/epic gamespeed; noble difficulty) yet I don't seem to manage to and I have a hard time pinpointing where my loss of time comes from.

There are so many factors involved in game time that it is impossible to reach a conclusion simply based on what others comment about their games.

If one is playing an OOC, a Wonder Economy, a small, cramped map on normal or quick speed, those factors can reduce play time.

My suggestion would simply be to use slower speeds/smaller maps. BUG mod can also be useful to decrease microing.

Personally, my games are usually epic and vary considerably (one game I had was 1 hour another was 16 hours and a game I am playing now will soon overtake that).


Tip: In order to not get bored when playing, how about post one of your games up on these forums with screenshots? I did that with 4 games so far and it has really helped me "motivate" myself to continue playing.

 

[wannabewarlord]

Thanks to everyone for some really useful tips!

MikeFleury: Thanks for the briefing on all those shortcuts and improvements, I think that is really gonna help (except for #14, I am not sure you meant this seriously )

Sisiutil: Cheers for taking the time to post in my insignificant question. Know that I read your ALC games with great interest and learn a lot from it. Your Beginner's Guide is still my bible

You give a valuable tip in that I should set myself little goals in between, and I just did that yesterday evening, when I said I am gonna wipe out Hannibal and curb Sitting Bull's enthusiasm. Lo and behold Hannibal is no more and Sitting Bull is mighty pissed, leaving just me and Washington to compete for Domination and a nice save game for me to continue tonight (although my cities are a mess, I need a cleanign up before I go for the big one )

All others: Thanks as well for the comments. Some really useful stuff in here and I am gonna try to implement it all.

And as for posting a game. Yes I was gonna do that sometime but I tend to get sloppy in the mid-game and people will be like "WTF?"
I shall play a clean neat game sometime in the future and try to post it. This community's tips are invaluable!

cheers,
wannabewarlord

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I guess I'd be someone like what you're looking for.

I usually play emperor/epic (working on immortal). My games last 2.5 to 4 hours on standard map sizes. Major tips:

- Fast combat
- Quick moves
- Hotkeys (m for mine, t for cottages, shift + P for pasture, etc)
- Queue your building production so you don't get popups for that every second.
- I strongly advocate against automating workers until later in the game. Once you've improved all the land you can expand peacefully into it's usually ok though. Just make sure you set them to leave old improvements.
- Stack move. Don't do pure stack attack but you can attack with a bunch of like-units.


I'm probably missing a few things I do without even thinking about it. One thing you can try to do for speed practice - "host" a multiplayer game (use LAN/direct IP whatever) and play it by yourself (just hit start). Set the game timer to "blazing!!!". This will FORCE you to finish a game in a few hours, although if you wait max turn timer later on it could still take like 5-6 in theory. I actually find that timer SLOW, so if you play it enough you should get used to doing things quickly .

 

[Pacifist46]

When I play on Noble, I normally win in around 2 1/2 hours.
When I play on Prince, (if) I win in around 6 hours.
The difference?
I can afford to automate workers on Noble

 

[CmdrGoob]

Check out BUG mod, it gives a ton of options for notifications of growth, health, unhappiness, changes in what the AIs will trade and all kinds of stuff, and you can write yourself reminder messages that will pop up a number of turns later. Makes micromanagement way faster and easier.

 

[wannabewarlord]

Yes, I Installed BUG yesterday. I have yet to find out what the little blue squares with funny symbols mean on top of my Unit Action Buttons, but concerning Notifications and stuff I am way happy; and yes it does help reducing "downtime" a lot.

However, I have yet to start writing notes but I need them dearly. I regularly forget the most important stuff (hey I have the Pyramids since 10 turns...why exactly didn't I switch to Representation? )

cheers,
wannabewarlord

 

[Sisiutil]

And as for posting a game. Yes I was gonna do that sometime but I tend to get sloppy in the mid-game and people will be like "WTF?"
I shall play a clean neat game sometime in the future and try to post it. This community's tips are invaluable!

Well, if you're sloppy in the mid-game, then that's precisely what you should post, in order to get the most worthwhile tips. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience here: posting a saved game to get advice isn't about pride, it's about improving your game. Most of the board participants are pretty civil with their comments--especially compared to other Internet message boards!

 

[thadian]

Your best bet is to conquer a neighbor early, and everything gets more interesting from there.

You could also try faster game speeds, but it depends on how and at what stage of the game you want to try to win.

OCC Space Race is going to be a slow game, for example but if you want to win from gunpowder you should start by keeping others crippled. Island countries you can sit privateers outside their borders and block off their trade and watch their economies die. Anything that slows down the AI can speed it up for you.

You might also turn off espionage unless you love the feature - it does slow things down.

Lastly, turn your graphic options to the lowest setting for faster transition of turn-by-turn. You might also tinker around and see if you can give yourself a 1 min limit or 2 min limit per turn.


Conquest/Domination tends to give the "fastest play" that ends the game the quickest.

 

[wannabewarlord]

So I finally continued a game yesterday and what satisfaction it gave me!

I was specifically going for domination, seeing as beside conquest the other victory conditions are not too hard for me to achieve on noble (methinks after proving I can dominate, it is time to move up a level...). I ended up winning diplomatically after all because after I built the U.N. and made Monty happy (and having Sitting Bull as my vassal), I was homefree for a diplo win and used that to "shorten" the game time.

After 5hrs 15min I won the game and I felt extreme satisfaction.
5hrs instead of 4...not so bad. I think for the future I will set myself up to roughly six hours and spread it over two evenings. That'll at least give me one proper game per week.

again, thanks for all the tips which I slowly begin to implement one after the other (already did save time with quite a few improvements to settings).

cheers,
wannabewarlord