How to effectively play faster / automate more?

[Perplexity]

Hi,

I'm looking for suggestions on how to play faster / micromanage less / automate more, without giving up too much.

After reading a ton on here, I've rapidly moved up a couple of difficulty levels. Last couple games were rather easy Monarch wins.

But the games have been taking forever. Biggest time drain is probably managing citizen assignments. Second is probably workers. Third is probably unit building / upgrading / grouping / etc.

So, how can I speed things up and still do well?

Do the within city citizen automation buttons do sensible things? Are there ways to design cities / improvements that make the governor buttons more effective?

It would be nice to automate workers... do they really do that bad of a job? Are there any ways to make them do a better job / design cities to take advantage of the way they work by default?

Any tricks for managing units? Rally points? Other keyboard shortcut stuff?

What else?

Thanks.

 

[Bleys]

TMIT is the man you want to talk too. He has a pretty good system, and plays games VERY quickly.

For myself, its a matter of just hitting the damn button and getting on with it. I can linger and look around far too long per turn.

 

[Perplexity]

Has he written anything about how he does it? I scanned through some of his recent posts but they are quite numerous...

 

[Bleys]

I'm sure he will give you a more accurate answer than I could, mate. No worries, he'll be along. Its one of those things he likes to talk about.

 

[mirthadir]

Generally the best shot is to go for a peaceful victory running REX, CE. Both space and culture lend themselves to less micro.

Workers I don't automate until I'm done improving all my tiles the first round through. Depending upon the game I may manually lay the first rails, but I almost inevitably send a half dozen workers out on trade route automation to lay track.

The key to making your workers better is to check "leave old improvements" and "do not chop trees" (or uncheck the opposite, whichever it is).

The single biggest time suck is war. If you go up against monster AIs, you might want to click on stack attack when you need to suicide 20+ siege in one go and do the same with the cleanup stack of draftees *turn it off* after your CPU crunches the 100 or whatever battles in the SODicide. Going flight early for airlift will also greatly speed up your micro for war logisitics (particularly transoceonic).

Also late game you can often do alright by automating missionaries and corpexecs.

 

[Perplexity]

I thought of a specific question about automation:

I just recently discovered the way that you can hold down on shift and queue multiple worker actions, like cottage then road. Is it possible to create lengthier queues -- including moves, for example?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I think in the spirit of DaveMCW taking on the cottage guide I requested, I should just write one on this. It's probably the only thing on this forum that I can actually call a specialty .

Let me finish finals first (or maybe not, I study as fast as I play but at least get done with work for the day), and I'll put a run-through start-to-finish of the approaches I use to play games quickly. Of course while I'm here I'll probably think about how I'll organize the guide at least. Putting pictures together would be nice but I'll have to play another game to get the relevant screen shots ----> the usual SS's I use emphasize my strategic gameplay choices or major game events, rather than the things I do to play more rapidly...so I don't have a good set of pictures to demonstrate.

Anyway, I'll get something up, just give me a little bit.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I thought of a specific question about automation:

I just recently discovered the way that you can hold down on shift and queue multiple worker actions, like cottage then road. Is it possible to create lengthier queues -- including moves, for example?

You can, but I don't recommend it...to easy to forget what you ordered or have the optimal decision change based on surrounding territory. Basically, queuing up a lot of worker actions early = extensively planning the rest of your game in your head and then setting actions for the worker based on that. If you're off even by a little, you'll just be re-doing the actions later at best, or at worst having your worker off doing something suboptimal.

I don't auto workers for a significant part of the game (sometimes I don't stop controlling them until after like 1700 AD, although on occasion much earlier...just depends). Controlling them doesn't slow you down THAT much . I probably spend less than 10 seconds a turn on worker actions on average...although in the renaissance and later it might be right around 10 or so, if I'm still doing it.

 

[JammerUno]

1. Turning of the graphic battles saves ALOT of time when you're warring later on.
2. Deciding when MM isn't needed anymore is a good idea too. At 10+ cities the gains will be relatively small, so I don't MM what tiles they work, I'll just set specialists up so I get the GP I want and let the cities do their thing.
3. If you're producing alot of troops, setting the queue to infinite and alternating is a good way of saving time (alt key). If I'm building two tanks to every infantry, I just queue it tank* tank* infantry*, if I need to build something in the meantime I put it in the queue without the infinite option.
4. Queueing city builds saves alot of time aswell. If you capture a city and plan to build it up, just queue the buildings so you don't get popups for city builds every other turn.
5. After improving the tiles in my BFCs I set all my workers to tradenetworking,they'll hook up all the resources and (rail)road every tile.

The city govenor could use some improving though, if I could just set a list of preferences for it and it would work that I'ld be happy, but as it is, I'll be building the hermitage in some backwater tundratown and that just doesn't fly.

 

[lilnev]

Once my empire has a handful of cities, I stop going into the city screens every turn. Scan the empire from the overall map and see if any cities are at half food -- they've probably just grown, and may need a tile adjustment. Use the build queue for building, or the "continuous training" for units.

You can do "partial stack attack" by clicking on a subset of your troops while holding down shift, then giving the order. So select the six catapults that you want to bring down the walls, give the command, select the five trebs that you want to attack first, give the order, etc.

I don't automate workers until I've got all the tile improvements I want, and then only for "trade network".

 

[Fetch]

Do you use the BUG mod? It's a big time saver!

 

[FlyinJohnnyL]

Do you use the BUG mod? It's a big time saver!

I'm not much of a MMer, so bug probably helped me to jump up a level all on it's own. I love having it tell me when I can whip, how much overflow, etc. So much useful info., the game shoulda been designed like this in the first place.

I just recently got the blue marble mod too, and while it won't make your games any faster, it sure does look great!

 

[Inspector Dex]

My last win at epic speed took 15 hours. I knew it was wrapped up after hour number eight, but it was my first win at a new level so I wanted to see it out. My question for some more experienced players than myself is, how do you feel about the auto-manage tiles settings? Does it do an adequate job? [I'm not talking about the auto-production setting (I like to pick what to build)].

Btw, TMIT made me laugh during the sticks and stones thread when he said that 6 hours of play was two or three games worth of time . I'm looking forward to hearing what you can tell us, TMIT!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Has he written anything about how he does it? I scanned through some of his recent posts but they are quite numerous...

I just noticed this. I've touched on things in the past but I don't think I've put it together comprehensively before. I think I have the time tomorrow after my group meeting to put something together. Probably 500-1000 word essay. The challenge will be to organize it and make it appear readable/understandable, unlike some of my ramblings here.

Indeed, I've posted a lot lately though . Like, say, about 14.5 posts a day for nearly a year! I was actually a little surprised the counter was that high myself until I noticed a month or two ago.

I guess this means I have too much time at work where I am idle, although it does get pretty busy on occasion .

 

[Mantic0re]

Kinda of a related question in warlords:

How do I find the bastards I automated so I can cancel the automation order?

My comp doesn't let me open the military adviser to see where each unit is so unless there is a hotkey or I see them zip by I'm pretty screwed if I misclick or need to switch of worker automation.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't know other than using the military adviser. They tend to clump in one city if they're not doing anything though so you're likely to find a bunch if you find any...unless they're on the field in which case you'd see them anyway.

There might be a worker hotkey but I don't use it. One of the harder things is to actually memorize what cities are doing so you don't have to check constantly (my comfort limit for this is about 8-12 cities depending on my mood). Believe it or not, I'm frequently vaguely aware of what my auto workers are doing any where they are...so I'm not sure how to answer this question, because while waiting for turns to pass you can see them (i frequently get impatient and try to check adviser screens between turns because I don't like waiting 5 seconds for my next turn -------> I don't think everyone is like this, but hopefully my guide helps regardless).

 

[Point13]

I'm only a noble player, but I find I prefer taking as much time as I need to in order to order workers, troops, and micromanage my cities based on their production/growth needs (ESPECIALLY early game). I could probably get away with not bothering on noble though.

 

[CouNterOrdeR]

Oi. I Auto my workers till the 1900s+... actually i guess i never stop heh. They mostly end up on Auto Trade Network with a cpl groups manually going around cleaning/fixing/otimizing what needs.

Cant wait for TMIT to spread some of his magic; my games slog on forever too. Dont think its because of MM though, but id sure love to hear how he finishes games as he does. What speed ya play TMIT?

 

[sinergistic]

Kinda of a related question in warlords:

How do I find the bastards I automated so I can cancel the automation order?

My comp doesn't let me open the military adviser to see where each unit is so unless there is a hotkey or I see them zip by I'm pretty screwed if I misclick or need to switch of worker automation.

Alt-click the 'Cancel Orders' buttons ( the red circle with a line through it ) which will send the 'cancel orders' button to all workers. This will wake them up if they are sleeping, will stop them building an improvement, and will turn off automation.

This works in BTS, I dunno about warlords. Try it.

 

[Gwynnja]

It helps to have a fast computer. During the later stages of games it slows down significantly.