In the late game, I turn on quick combat on defense as well. I reccomend using stack attack if you aren't already, and finally start using rallying points as well as continuous building.
This gets my military to 1 or two key points, and then each turn my main management is what I want each city to build. Hopefully by this point you don't need to manage your workers any more either making the game much easier.
I couldn't agree more! I know this post is mucho old but I was about to start a new thread and I came accross this so I thought I would just add to it...
Long term civ iv fan and still playing it long after all of my friends moved on to newer things. I thought I would share with you some thoughts on late game logistics and it would be great to hear how others do it or any suggestions on my current setup.
For a while now I have been getting frustrated with the end game. I used to both love it and hate it. I love the units, productivity and tactics but the micromanagement breaks me. To set the scene - I am almost always a declare-war crazy person and fight my way to the bitter end. Also my games are varied in setup but always are marathon and huge in size. In my latest 70hr epic I, once again, find my panzers finishing off my continent's remnants of past great civilizations and I begin to look at the bigger picture. In this scenario I have another continent with my two closest rivals (since the beginning) sitting in a friendly little set up amongst 5-6 other civs who all seem to be getting along rather nicely but a little edgy about me over the deep blue. I take a deep breath, pan out to world view and start drawing on my fronts of attack and defence, key targets e.g. uranium and oil for my aircraft carriers to disrupt, and for the first time started to think about logistics
You see, the end game, in my opinion, can be severely hampered by micromanaging cities and moving new units to join the push for one single race! This can be an even greater irritation when oceans divide your production cities and the front line.
With careful planning I am surely going to win but, when it is a single player game, you have to ask is it worth the time? I love the conquering and military strategy of placing carriers near resources loaded up with a couple fighters with +2 range, readying the tanks on the front line and getting bombers in airports etc. So a little tip I thought I would share is my logistic backbone
First off my situation means that in my 'old country land' (initial cities from many centuries ago) I have many that are good for churning out the fighting units. I usually specialise one with every GG that emerges and right now I have panzers rolling out of the door with Combat V. So I sacrifice any late game building additions to cities that aren't commerce focused and automate key units. So I have a couple rolling out tanks, some building destroyers and carriers, some infantry and others are working on bombers and fighters. Using the Shift+Right Click technique (If you select a city from the main view but only by clicking once so that it opens a short cut view to change building orders etc you can then shift+right click on another tile to setup an automatic rally point for newly completed units) I pick a key city closest to the new continent but still on my continent. I use the labelling system in world view to label it LOGISTIC OUT for easy reference. This little trick works with missiles, tactical nukes, rebasing built planes etc as well which is a real bonus.
For the remaining newly conquered cities I will make sure I build a few key buildings to help get it in to shape. For the vast majority I simply turn on either more units that take much longer but help the "cause" or build "gold". I let go of the urge to carefully nurture each city to full bloom in order to focus on the military war machine advancing to the East!
My Navy does require a little more careful planning in order to protect my waters in other directions and I would recommend that you sort this out early as well. Now, with your newly focused rally point a mere handful of tiles away from the soon-to-be-captured neighbouring civs you can simply spend a short amount of time selecting all units and fortifying once only each turn. Also, I would recommend rallying transport ships and all other navy one tile away because the game has an annoying glitch where if you select all land units in a city it reselects boats every time. If possible, get transport ships bumped up to have a +2 movement range to keep up with the destroyers in protection. Use the node to load up ships/subs later on with tactical nukes or missiles. Move units onto transports a tile away so that you can batch move instead of having to select and load four at a time. The initial rally point set up is quite time consuming but man is it worth doing.
Finally, what you should have is a node that collects all your units a turn and have an efficient batch movement on to the front line. Once you capture that first city you start moving your convoy of transports + protection back and forth distributing stacks to play with against the enemy. My turns usually work out like this.
1 Choose any buildings to build on recently captured cities that are growing
2 Scan the map for enemy movement
3 Fortify all units on my rally point and promote where necessary
4 When transport is available, batch move on to boats and move to new node to disembark
5 Focus on micromanaging the front line effort and moving my waves of forces forward from the disembark city
I have found the late game particularly enjoyable in this game and have spent a lot of time planning and executing ways to wipe out all civs on the continent without spending much time on the management of my cities and units. If people are interested in the above I can post some screenshots to show the example. I am sure this wont work in every case but I have since used it on an inland game where I rally units to a point where I can then branch off on roads to various front lines. Also, marathon/huge makes this technique particularly valuable. The scale of the war in this example was quite unbelievable by my own experience. Every three turns my transport ships would load 20-30 units and my ship count grew almost out of control.
As a side point if anyone is interested: The key turning point was when my no1 rival declared war on his neighbour for no real reason! I had just sussed out the location of all his nukes and how best to attack without suffering heavy losses in stacks from nukes. He, instead decided to use all of his nukes in one go on a struggling neighbour and I then completely crippled his nuke capability and major unit building city. This is the one point that grates me and why I am desperate to start some online fun with competition that thinks outside of the box a little!!! I digress.
Please let me know if you have any feedback or further info to add to the technique in order to minimise the burden of large empire management at the end game stages. I am also aware that it is likely that anyone who still reads civ iv forums is likely to have a detailed understanding far greater than mine and knows this already but there may be someone else out there like me who would really appreciate this little tip.
Finally, if anyone is interested in the actual save game of mine to have a real loo
