managing a very big empire, city buildings, tile improvements

[tramwajg]

Greetings,

I would like to ask if you know any mod that makes managing a very big empire easier. When I am playing on a huge map and I dont want to make puppet cities, after a while I have about 30-40 cities and my empire is still growing. It becomes hard to micromanage every single city and make improvements on adjacent tiles, and it takes a lot of time.

Generally, I develop most cities in one way, same with adjacent tiles, and of course railroads connecting all cities. Is it possible to apply this approach automatically to every new captured/built city, so that I can comcentrate on war, technologies and everything like that?

 

[Fluffball]

If you have that many cities you usually have an army of workers which you either built or generally captured.
When it gets like that i tend to use my workers en mass like a wave across my empire having all workers concentrate on 1 city at a time and improving all relevant tiles then moving them onto the next city.

The only way i know to automate is to automate workers but i generally find that a bad idea as they regularly improve tiles in ways you don't want them to.

 

[Ryika]

When I've got an empire that big I usually don't focus on micromanaging the tile-improvements anymore. I just build/buy enough workers so the Auto-AI manages to keep up with my conquering, tell one of them to build the road to the new city and let the rest do whatever they want. (Just make sure to disable removing improvements for automated workers) While that is in no way optimal, it really doesn't matter that much at that point - those cities will never become huge production-facilities before the game is over and when you play without puppets, you should have more production that you can fit units onto the map anyway.

For cities, well... production-queue. But later on you might just want to use puppets - or gold-focus. Production-Capacity just doesn't give any benefit anymore when you're reproducing more units than you're losing and you can just buy important buildings.

So yeah... while I don't really know any mods that are helpful in that regard, my advice in a nutshell: Don't feel like you have to keep up all the micromanagement, just let the AI do the job.

 

[subtledoctor]

I used to have huge empires like yours on Civ4... but in that game cities would specialize in different ways, each had more personality, and the management and build queues would reflect it. In Civ5 there are just big cities, and smaller cities that haven't yet caught up to the big ones (and likely never will).

Civ5 streamlines a lot: it's designed for you to manage fewer cities, fewer units, fewer techs, etc. So I've adapted my playstyle to it by generally creating smaller empires. Rather than using a huge map to make an 8-civ game with big empires, I make it a 32-civ game, where my empire is a smaller fish in a bigger pond. More competition, more diplomacy, more like the real world.

So basically, if you want to play with a huge empire, it should be because you enjoy managing huge empires. If you don't like the micromanagement, then you should adapt your playstyle to run smaller empires. (Please note, I'm not judging anyone's preferred playstyle or trying to be critical here - just trying to help people get maximum satisfaction out of the game. Cheers!)

 

[danaphanous]

wow! 30-40!

I'm with you. I like to manage and settle. I managed one game where I settled about 20-24 cities that I managed all myself and completely improved all tiles. I didn't find it too hard as I expanded in waves and only had about 5 cities to focus on at a time. I also hate auto-AI workers, so I typically would keep the majority on manual and move them en masse from one city to the another. I kept at least 2 groups, sometimes 4 going otherwise you're sacrificing growth on some of the cities for too long.

Auto-workers take forever and get in each others way trying to lay railroads and roads especially, so I've never found a work-around for that. I just manually manage them to get track laid quick during the railroad boom. mid-game I turned "remove improvements" off, moved some workers to my core, and turned them on auto. They were nice, as they went back to my core and improved random tiles I'd forgotten or hadn't need back when my cities were lower-pop, but never more than a few as 20 auto-workers will waste many turns getting in each-other's way, they tended to do well as isolated little guys without a lot of other workers around.

I tended to only micro-manage tiles for up to population 6 or so, then I'd lock the really nice tiles such as landmarks that I always wanted worked, buy aqueducts and turn the cities on pure growth. I'd periodically check on them, just letting the governor take care of the business of prioritizing and growing. Eventually, the city would hit 15+ pop and might be working all good tiles and wasting the rest on ocean, etc. to grow quicker. Once I saw maybe 5 of these wasteful tiles I'd switch the governor to default, which would usually eliminate all of these tiles and turn them into specialists. The city would then be a good one with decent production/science/gold after that. Building orders I still decided to choose as it wasn't always straightforward and depended on terrain/economy.

 

[Furtherado]

If you`re that big, even on a huge map I don`t see why you feel you need to keep up with micro as the game should be all but won at that point.

 

[reddishrecue]

You can easily set cities fwr away from where you're focused to build wealth or research. That will leave the other cities that you don't need to leave you alone.