How do I manage a big empire?

[John Smith]

I like very much to play on a huge map with 16 civs, but when I get more than around 50 cities, the micromanaging is getting very boring. I know there are several ways to automate workers and city production, but how and when should I use them?

Do any of you use these functions, or do I just have to be more patient when I play on huge maps?

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

First of all I don`t use the governours. they simply suck!

As for worker automation: shift-a is quite good, but I tend to keep 10% of my workers (that is my nationals, too) non-automated, using them for long-distance road, irrgation and rail construction.

City micro management is pretty soon taken car of once you have enough lux and wonders to keep people happy up to size 10 or so, Simple use a build queue for small cities, adn have dedicated military production centers. Use the "always start last built unit" option!

Hope this helps!

 

[BillChin]

Use the governors and automate 90% of the workers. Fortify and sentry (Press Y or Shift Y) most of your units.

The governors do not do what you ask, but they do a good job at managing happiness so you rarely see the civil disorder pop up. Experiment with the priorities, the code seems buggy. I have managed to get max shields out of a city, though never by setting that as the only priority. For maybe ten core cities I might micromanage, the rest are left to the buggy governor code. This way the loss in efficiency is minimal and the gain in time is substantial.

Turn on repeat last unit built. Turn off all animations. Turn off wonder building. Turn off prompt after building each unit. These steps will cut down on time for each turn.

There was a thread about speeding up turns, you might do a search for it to get a lot more hints. You will eek a bit more out of a large empire by micromanaging, but spend 10x as much time for each turn. You can probably play three more games in the time it takes to micromanage a large empire to the finish. Your choice.

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

BillChin: never tried it, but do you think click all options (or almost all) would get the gov to work ok????

 

[Exile_Ian]

The other thing to remember is the queue feature for setting the build instructions for a city (as opposed to letting the city governors run everything). When I'm up to about 10 cities and still building new ones, I'll usually set a new city to build a defensive unit (assuming I already provided it with at least one); followed by Temple, Library, Granary, Harbor (in whatever sequence seems most appropriate for the geographical location). My aim being to get that city to grow at least to 6 before I have to go back and replan it. I've even sometimes put something like 'Palace' in the queue as a kind of 'run out of plan' indicator. I would never want it to build the Palace of course, but at least I won't be wasting shields building (and perhaps completing) the wrong thing. Its easy enought to spot the palaces in the F1 list and take over the management again.

I agree about the large cities though - its usually best to manage them yourself. When you're building a Wonder you really want to wring out every shield you can. I also hate seeing the governors continue to build for growth when I've already hit the 12 limit (e.g. waiting on Sanitation) - you need to get in there and start switching to Scientists/Tax Collectors depending on what the strength of that city is - i.e. if you've already got a University - make Scientists so they're more effective).

Having said all that, I know I waste a lot of resources in many of my cities, purely because I don't micro manage them - but that's a compromise really.