Late Game War

[Tyrant Roger]

I always find the BC period an exciting, fast moving part of the game. This is much of what makes this game so addictive. But in the modern era when you are dealing with dozens of cities, huge numbers of units [and AI opposing units], and other distractions, the game slows way down and so does the excitement/engagement meter for me. What mechanics are available to minimize this problem?

I just tried accelerated combat [i.e. animations off] and this was a major help with no real downside. But what else can be done? It is possible to have multiunit air combat, but how do you do that with land units?

I find automating workers to be more trouble than it is worth. I usually let the AI governor run my cities with only an occasion correction by me. But that still takes lots of time.

 

[carl corey]

Do you use the BUG mod? It saves a lot of time in all eras but especially in the end by telling you simple infos like when a city will grow, when you can whip and for how much, when an AI will trade a tech/resource, etc. I also deactivated combat animations long time ago. They were nice at first but I've played enough games that they'd just bother me now. I disable the combat zoom, and enable quick combats on offense and defense, stuff like that. I don't usually like to do multi-unit combat for land units (you can do it by selecting several unit, but the attacks are still one by one, or through "stack attack" - I think). Also, no movies and no pop-ups: city builds, tech choice and civic changes are neatly arranged on the right side of the screen and bother you only at the end of the turn if you haven't treated them until then.

And TMIT's Guide to Speed Civving might be just what you need. You can ask more questions in there if interested.

 

[Skallagrimson]

I have standard build queues for "vanilla" cities, especially conquered cities that are setup hybrid by the AI. CTRL+1 for build queue 1, CTRL+2 for build queue type 2, etc. (Cities destined for pure-prod or pure-commerce are different so they have their own queues).

In the city screen or city selected, type the number of the queue and voila, the builds are queued.

For units, I usually have one city building one of each useful unit type perpetually (alt+unit), and a few other cities perpetually building units that are "high attrition" like trebuchets. I don't MM at all in the late game (just quick glance at the F1 screen, making sure nothing's hitting their happy/healthy limits).

To me modern war can be even more exciting than ancient or medieval, because of more variables that can play into a strategy. Instead of "all axemen, all the time", you have an air strategy, a naval strategy, rocketry strategy, more complex espionage strategy, tricky diplomacy strategy, corporation strategy, all converging turn by turn.

To me the ancient era moves slow because it takes forever to build anything. Yawn, yawn, yawn... friggin' yawn already GIVE ME MY AXEMAN!!! lol...

 

[carl corey]

What happens when you load a queue but the city already has one of the buildings in the queue? For example after conquering a city that kept it's courthouse, you load the queue "granary - courthouse - forge". Does it skip the already built building and keep all the rest?

 

[Skallagrimson]

What happens when you load a queue but the city already has one of the buildings in the queue? For example after conquering a city that kept it's courthouse, you load the queue "granary - courthouse - forge". Does it skip the already built building and keep all the rest?

Yes, it skips what's been built, which means to setup a really good queue might take a couple of tries in a couple of different cities to catch all the situations (e.g., including a lighthouse for coastals).