samildanach
Necrophile
Lose! It works for me 
.
.
How do you speed up your game?
- Thread starter Jove
- Start date
... says the GOTM vet with 19 victories and 0 losses behind his name. Tsssk. 
samildanach
Necrophile
a space oddity said:... says the GOTM vet with 19 victories and 0 losses behind his name. Tsssk.
Yes. Well I'm not new to this strategy, in GOTM37 it worked very well. I find that by not submitting it also cuts down on time
WackenOpenAir
Deity
I have only one thing to make you play faster AND keep playing good.
I waste a lot of time double checking things in my game because i don't know if i checked them already that turn. (when turns are starting to take an hour or so)
I think a solution would be to write down all steps to do in a turn like:
-trading
-using militairy
-checking city builds
-microing production and short rushing
-and LASTLY, check happiness.
Making a little list like that would both prevent you from doing things double and it would prevent you making errors.
I didn't do it myself yet because it would make gaming seem too much like work.
PS, i do not use any of the tools like civassist except to see how far i am with domination limmit late in the game. Yes, i think they do save time. Yes they prevent riots, but do they prevent you leaving the lux slider higher then needed? And besides that, i just don't like them and rather play the game myself.
(although it would be a great challenge for me to write an AI in for either civ or starcraft, but that would take so much time i'd really need to get payed for it
)
I waste a lot of time double checking things in my game because i don't know if i checked them already that turn. (when turns are starting to take an hour or so)
I think a solution would be to write down all steps to do in a turn like:
-trading
-using militairy
-checking city builds
-microing production and short rushing
-and LASTLY, check happiness.
Making a little list like that would both prevent you from doing things double and it would prevent you making errors.
I didn't do it myself yet because it would make gaming seem too much like work.
PS, i do not use any of the tools like civassist except to see how far i am with domination limmit late in the game. Yes, i think they do save time. Yes they prevent riots, but do they prevent you leaving the lux slider higher then needed? And besides that, i just don't like them and rather play the game myself.
(although it would be a great challenge for me to write an AI in for either civ or starcraft, but that would take so much time i'd really need to get payed for it
)Arrrr, I tried to buy into the hype and install CivAssist, but I get an error when I try to run it:
Failed to load control 'SSTab' from TABCTL32ocx.
It says my version may be outdated, make sure I have the one that came with the application. Well excuse me, I didn't even know it was coming with the application, sheesh!
So what now?
Failed to load control 'SSTab' from TABCTL32ocx.
It says my version may be outdated, make sure I have the one that came with the application. Well excuse me, I didn't even know it was coming with the application, sheesh!
So what now?
Forget CivAssist and start using CRpMapStatJove said:
.
MOTH
Emperor
I first was using CivAssist and have found that CRPMapStat saves me more time because the alerts pop focus to MapStat. I do still use CivAssist for some functions like checking active trades.
solenoozerec
Stranger
samildanach said:Yes. Well I'm not new to this strategy, in GOTM37 it worked very well. I find that by not submitting it also cuts down on time
Why not to compete for green ambulance and not to submit your game?
samildanach
Necrophile
solenoozerec said:
I want to maintain the illusion of invincibility
. I do not consider green ambulances to be helpful in this endeavor .The real reason is once a game has gone pear shaped I will restart and play it differently and I generally won't go to the trouble of saving the original game so its autosaves get over written. So I no longer have a game to submit.
davidcrazy
Warlord
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2003
- Messages
- 178
does CRpMapStat warns you when new trade opportunity about luxuries come up?Dianthus said:Forget CivAssist and start using CRpMapStat
GOTM38 is the first game that i started to use crpmapstat but it seems it doesn't do well in reporting luxuries. but other than that it's really amazing and helped me a lot in trading techs.
I am a big fan of Dianthus' mapstat but it isn't reliable enough to tell you about impending riots as it can only look at the autosave, which is obviously at the start of the turn. It is very easy to do something during the turn such as move a defender out of a town that will tip the town over to riot, and mapstat won't pick this up. I have had silly riots this way, so you still do need to check for happiness manually before hitting spacebar.
That said, everyone should have mapstat. I have civassist as well, which is also great, but I only check out what it is telling me occasionally. Dianthus and Ainwood: you are legends .
That said, everyone should have mapstat. I have civassist as well, which is also great, but I only check out what it is telling me occasionally. Dianthus and Ainwood: you are legends
.
Randy
Prince
Offa said:
What I do is, save the game at the end of my turn. Then open the file with mapstats. You can then fix all cities before you hit enter.
Now the only riots I get are from capitured cities that a lot of restores stop resisting.
Yes. There is an option to enable my own trade route algorithm that will need to be enabled for sea/air trade routes. It's the bright red checkbox on the Notification tab of the preferences form.davidcrazy said:
If you spot any cases where CRpMapStat appears to be buggy then make sure to let me know in my CRpSuite thread. Just post a .sav file and a short description and I'll fix it!davidcrazy said:
Even better, CRpMapStat can monitor another directory as well as the autosave one. Just enable that in the preferences, then save to that dir from CIV. CRpMapStat will automatically open it for you!Randy said:
ControlFreak
Not An Addict, Really
For this first time in 10months, I was able to finish GOTM38 in time for submission (weeks early actually). The holidays helped but I also had resigned myself to play faster. I used some of the advice here and have a couple of things to add.
CivAssist was great for telling me when techs were available. (I wish there was a notification for when one of the other civs learns a tech that I had at monopoly because that tends to be when I sell it for what I can get. Hint hint Ainwood )
I have not tried crpMapStat but plan to download it soon.
Most of the rest of my time saving techniques come from the F1 screen:
City Names
I tried a variation of Bradleyfeanor's city naming. I prefixed every town name with R#_ where # was the radius from the palace or FP. Anything above R8 was labelled RM_ for Max. Clicking on "City Name" head for that column sorted the cities by radius. This worked great for the early game and really helped me decide build orders from the F1 screen instead of opening each town. From F1, right clicking the production drops a list down to view your choices.
Happiness
To check for happiness for F1, I also have the mini-moodbadge graphics installed for the PopHeads. I click on the "Happiness" Header to sort towns in ascending order of happy people. Then check the first city's number of happy people, this number is my "Maximum allowed blue circles". Then I check all cities in order until I find a city with more blue circles allowed. Check to see if my Maximum allowed has gone up. If not, adjust for happiness. If yes, continue with the new "Maximum allowed blue circles". Counting the little blue circles is realatively quick. Having things sorted by the number of happy people allowed me to scroll down to the first city that had a number of blue circles greater than the last bracket of happy people. It also lets me stop when I get to 6 happy people because until hosptials, the max city size is 12 which will be content with 6 happy faces.
Shields
I also sort by sheilds to pick and chose micromanagement (I prefer to micro manage when I can make a 9shield town into a 10shield town because it reduces waste on the build turns. Other land marks are 7s to build archers/spears, 15s when building swords/horses. I actually made an excel chart to divide the cost of a unit by 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 turns. Then I make the unit build selections from the F1 screen according to the shield production of that town, to minimize waste. This has helped reduce my desire to go into every town, every turn to micromanage.
Commerce
Quick way to determine where markets/libraries/Copernicus will have the most impact.
Food
Quick way to determine where workers can be produced, which towns need irrigation, which size 12 towns can be MM for shields. Note that sorting is done by surpus food so in ascending order the first towns are slow growing, the last towns are fast growing. The red number is the amount of food consumption so if your good at dividing by two in your head, its a quick way to see what size city it is without having to count faces. Sorting by Population (over the faces) sorts by city size.
Producing
When prebuilding for librarys or universitys, if I alway reserve colleseums for prebuilds, I can sort by producing, find the block of coleseums and change them all by right clicking. MUCH FASTER than panning through the map. (Who builds colleseums anyway )
For me, learning how to use the F1 screen has sped up things a lot. There's a lot of information there. You can see how much science you're making per turn by looking at the Expenses box. If you have no specialists, that the amount of science you make per turn. By looking at CivAssist's estimate of tech cost, you can figure out if you're one library or two specialist away from four turn research.
As many of these things are just built in game mechanics, this may have been obvious to many of you. But for me it has taken a while to learn.
One other thing that really payed off (and was mentioned previously) was stacking workers and then moving them with CNTL+J.
Looking forward to more suggestions.
CivAssist was great for telling me when techs were available. (I wish there was a notification for when one of the other civs learns a tech that I had at monopoly because that tends to be when I sell it for what I can get. Hint hint Ainwood
)I have not tried crpMapStat but plan to download it soon.
Most of the rest of my time saving techniques come from the F1 screen:
City Names
I tried a variation of Bradleyfeanor's city naming. I prefixed every town name with R#_ where # was the radius from the palace or FP. Anything above R8 was labelled RM_ for Max. Clicking on "City Name" head for that column sorted the cities by radius. This worked great for the early game and really helped me decide build orders from the F1 screen instead of opening each town. From F1, right clicking the production drops a list down to view your choices.
Happiness
To check for happiness for F1, I also have the mini-moodbadge graphics installed for the PopHeads. I click on the "Happiness" Header to sort towns in ascending order of happy people. Then check the first city's number of happy people, this number is my "Maximum allowed blue circles". Then I check all cities in order until I find a city with more blue circles allowed. Check to see if my Maximum allowed has gone up. If not, adjust for happiness. If yes, continue with the new "Maximum allowed blue circles". Counting the little blue circles is realatively quick. Having things sorted by the number of happy people allowed me to scroll down to the first city that had a number of blue circles greater than the last bracket of happy people. It also lets me stop when I get to 6 happy people because until hosptials, the max city size is 12 which will be content with 6 happy faces.
Shields
I also sort by sheilds to pick and chose micromanagement (I prefer to micro manage when I can make a 9shield town into a 10shield town because it reduces waste on the build turns. Other land marks are 7s to build archers/spears, 15s when building swords/horses. I actually made an excel chart to divide the cost of a unit by 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 turns. Then I make the unit build selections from the F1 screen according to the shield production of that town, to minimize waste. This has helped reduce my desire to go into every town, every turn to micromanage.
Commerce
Quick way to determine where markets/libraries/Copernicus will have the most impact.
Food
Quick way to determine where workers can be produced, which towns need irrigation, which size 12 towns can be MM for shields. Note that sorting is done by surpus food so in ascending order the first towns are slow growing, the last towns are fast growing. The red number is the amount of food consumption so if your good at dividing by two in your head, its a quick way to see what size city it is without having to count faces. Sorting by Population (over the faces) sorts by city size.
Producing
When prebuilding for librarys or universitys, if I alway reserve colleseums for prebuilds, I can sort by producing, find the block of coleseums and change them all by right clicking. MUCH FASTER than panning through the map. (Who builds colleseums anyway
)For me, learning how to use the F1 screen has sped up things a lot. There's a lot of information there. You can see how much science you're making per turn by looking at the Expenses box. If you have no specialists, that the amount of science you make per turn. By looking at CivAssist's estimate of tech cost, you can figure out if you're one library or two specialist away from four turn research.
As many of these things are just built in game mechanics, this may have been obvious to many of you. But for me it has taken a while to learn.
One other thing that really payed off (and was mentioned previously) was stacking workers and then moving them with CNTL+J.
Looking forward to more suggestions.
bradleyfeanor
King
Thanks for posting your results ControlFreak! I like your method of applying the tag to the beginning of the name, and I am going to try this out on my next game. I like the way you are handling the happiness check as well. I need to download those mood badges.
al_thor
Prince
Speaking from experience, it is very true that finishing both the GOTM & the COTM is a difficult task.
I definitely use CrpMapStat. Turn off Animation. Use Ctl+J for stack movement.
Also, just before I get Coal, I position my Wokers at various points - spread out across my empire. Then, as soon as I get Coal, I will do a Ctl/Shift/R with most/all of them, which will task them on building Rail for MANY turns. The first order of business is to connect all cities. I use a few extra to concentrate on the very productive core cities.
Aside from being a big time saver, the Ctl/Shift/R does another thing for you: If your Coal runs out or your Trade for Coal comes to an end, the Workers that are doing the 'long stretches' WILL CONTINUE to lay Rail even though you don't have it. That is very sweet indeed.
I definitely use CrpMapStat. Turn off Animation. Use Ctl+J for stack movement.
Also, just before I get Coal, I position my Wokers at various points - spread out across my empire. Then, as soon as I get Coal, I will do a Ctl/Shift/R with most/all of them, which will task them on building Rail for MANY turns. The first order of business is to connect all cities. I use a few extra to concentrate on the very productive core cities.
Aside from being a big time saver, the Ctl/Shift/R does another thing for you: If your Coal runs out or your Trade for Coal comes to an end, the Workers that are doing the 'long stretches' WILL CONTINUE to lay Rail even though you don't have it. That is very sweet indeed.
Sounds like a bug to me... but if this is common knowledge, I guess it doesn't matter.
Randy
Prince
a space oddity said:
It is the same as building units, you start a swordsman the AI pillages your iron. You can finish the swordsman.
Think of it like this. You start a project (swordsman or railroad) the iron shows up so your worker can start using it, then out of the blue you have no more iron. Well you can't start a new project but you still have the iron for all the started project it just at the blacksmith's shop getting the final touch.
al_thor said:
I guess it WILL be commoner knowledge now!a space oddity said:
That's very interesting, and I did not know that Ctl/Shift/R worked this way. I tend to use Worker gangs to build my railroads until my cities are connected and key cities' production/growth is enhanced (than I tend to automate the Workers). If possession of coal is precarious, I'd definitely consider using this command.
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