Level of micromanagement

[rantzzz]

How much do you guys micro manage? I'm quite new to Civ, and I find the level of micro management is quite high compared to MOO2.

Micro managing one city is still alright, but when it gets to 3 or more cities I tend to automate my workers and tiling because it's just too much!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Ironically, there is less micro in this game than Civ IV as you have far fewer decision points for micro/turn (less units, still fewer cities, generally smaller populations), but the poor UI requires more inputs to do any one action and trade routes constantly prompt the player.

Once you start getting to 7+ cities with a good body of workers, nearly 2 dozen trade routes, and some military units it starts getting really brutal. In most cases, however, you can get by without optimizing it.

 

[Martin Alvito]

If you think this has more micro than MOO2, you're not playing that game right. Housing colonies in that game can go die, especially once you're running them on a bunch of star systems. I might still be playing that game if not for the fact that I know I'm going to end up scrolling through that screen for several minutes every turn moving colonists around and making sure that I find all the housing colonies that grew a second colonist last turn.

This game's issues are more UI and bias towards wide than micro. The trade routes are an asinine time sink, but at least that's fixable. All they need to do is make them like your cell phone contract - you can check out new options after a while if you want, but nobody's forcing you to do anything.

Right now, the game feels like playing Yang for an easy, peaceful Diplo win on a Huge map in SMAC. If you've ever tried it, the basic plan is to get home base to size 5 rapidly, run up to IA with Librarians, build the PTS (same effect as Settler Clans), and then just kudzu the planet with geometric progression of Colony Pod spam while you research up to MMI for the win. By the time you get up to 50+ cities, the Former (roads) and Colony Pod inputs eat up enough time to reduce you to a few turns an hour.

It's saying something that the number of inputs per turn feels like that. It's not actually that bad, but the UI is slow/unresponsive enough that the midgame feels just as painful right now.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ You can improve speed considerably by disabling animations. I certainly have a better machine than when I picked up civ V, but some of the forced delay doesn't seem to be there now. IBT isn't blazing fast, but it's only bad with (off screen) animations going.

The UI layout itself is a mess though. Not just with trade routes, but you can't for example queue up a few health buildings in a row to avoid prompts for 10+ turns (assuming you want to do that) without jumping through hoops. Once upon a time, you could click on the city 1 time, hold a button, and then merely select the sequence you wanted...rather than navigating into the city specifically, manually enabling the queue, then queue buildings. In fact, just picking production requires extra clicks unless you use the gear prompt.

It's certainly a far cry from queuing a few units, saving that as a hotkey, and then replicating that sequence in the future, or from selecting a few cities and ordering a unit build in all at once from the main screen...both of which were possible in previous civ titles. With a renewed emphasis on wide play, that kind of feature is sorely missed, but the trade route issue exacerbates the topic.

 

[Pac-Dragon]

They've got to remove the trade route pop up spam, it's really detracting from some otherwise awesome mechanics. The way I wish they'd fix it is to just put a drop down in the trade route window. Let you select where the route's going next, with "no change" as the default, and show the yields next to each available route. Then you only have to deal that crap when something changes (building a wonder, pumping units, teching, etc). I'm getting really tired of being constantly interrupted by trade route selections whenever I'm trying to do something interesting.

 

[rantzzz]

In MOO2 it was easier to micro manage because they had one overall summary screen of planets and you can move workers around from that screen

In CIVBE you can't do that, and information is all over the place. Agreed that the UI needs some refinement

 

[Eji1700]

In MOO2 it was easier to micro manage because they had one overall summary screen of planets and you can move workers around from that screen

In CIVBE you can't do that, and information is all over the place. Agreed that the UI needs some refinement

The endless games have this as well, and I have to say endless legend nailed the hell out of city management UI. Shame the rest of the game feels like a balance train wreck(although to be fair i need to go back and see what's changed)

 

[AgentDib]

The trade route issue can be alleviated somewhat without mods if you take advantage of the fact that the trade route menu is alphabetically sorted.

I pick my capital and usually one other city to send interior trade routes to and then rename them to Aardvark, Aardwolf (etc). I can re-assign the routes by just clicking the top entry in the list which speeds the process up significantly, as I used to spend a lot of that time making sure I was sending the new trade route to the right city.

The cities grow quickly enough to keep the trade routes high yield. On my just completed Apollo Standard game I had a dozen cities or so and at the end of the game every route was still +3/+6 +5/+9 towards my capital or better.

 

[Kin]

They've got to remove the trade route pop up spam, it's really detracting from some otherwise awesome mechanics. The way I wish they'd fix it is to just put a drop down in the trade route window. Let you select where the route's going next, with "no change" as the default, and show the yields next to each available route. Then you only have to deal that crap when something changes (building a wonder, pumping units, teching, etc). I'm getting really tired of being constantly interrupted by trade route selections whenever I'm trying to do something interesting.

Yes, you got that right. I agree make a default and let me change it if and when I want to.

 

[misterchief]

I pick my capital and usually one other city to send interior trade routes to and then rename them to Aardvark, Aardwolf (etc). I can re-assign the routes by just clicking the top entry in the list which speeds the process up significantly, as I used to spend a lot of that time making sure I was sending the new trade route to the right city.

Great tip for internal trade routes, thanks. Managing trade routes is the most annoying thing in the world for me (I like to play wide with lots of cities and therefore trade routes), so this will help relieve some of the pain.

 

[Proteus]

How much do you guys micro manage?...

100%
here are only a few games where I trust the AI enough to put significant parts of the game under AI control (in fact the only game that comes to my mind from scratch, where this is the case, is Distant Worlds)