Make Me a FASTER Civ Player

[mercury529]

Hello everyone. I feel I have a pretty solid grasp on how to win on Emperor. I generally play a Standard Size/Speed Pangea map (with all other settings at default). However, I find my games to take a long amount of time to play (but wouldn't want to change the game settings). I tend to micromanage pretty heavily. I generally end up in the city screen for every city every turn. This is reasonable at the beginning of the game, but once I get above 6 cities, it starts to take too much time. I tried using the F1 menu, but for the time being I am just more comfortable in the city screen (but that is something I intend to force myself into using instead).

I also micromanage my workers pretty heavily (trying never to waste a turn of movement when an improvement can be done along the way). It certainly helps me, but it does slow down gameplay some.

Are there any tips people can give to speed up my gameplay? I am unfamiliar with some of the game features (I just recently found out about the ability to use drawing tools inside the game). Are there any ways to set notifications for certain events? Can I flag certain cities 1 turn before/immediately after they grow? Can I be notified when a unit is whippable/buyable? Is there anything about the F1 screen I may not be aware of? Can newly produced military units automatically be set to go to a certain location? Any other tips?

Thanks a lot.

 

[LlamaCat]

the answer to most of your questions is no, I believe. but you can set newly created units to go to a rallying point. first you click the city bar so that city is "selected" then you SHIFT-right click on a tile and you should get a yellow circle, which you can SHIFT-right click anywhere.

be careful when using this, however, as it's easy to lose track of where they are going and unless you have units set to auto-promote, they won't be promoted until they get to the rallying point and you bother to do it. the problem here is if you were in a war or something and they get picked off on the way to the rallying point.

the F1 screen is great for the simple reason that you can sort each category by clicking on the category headers. this way you can see what your top commerce, production, science, trade, etc. cities are.

and from this F1 screen, you can double click the city icon (far left) to go straight into the city screen, then it takes you back out to F1 when done. this saves me a little time vs. scrolling around the map

there is a mod that will give you all these notifications things that you are asking about (1 turn to growth, etc.) but I'm in the minority and think it makes the game different and easier. but it works great for most people so I would look for that.

workers: you can set a few to build automated road networks, which should help speed up things a bit. personally I don't automate workers ever but I probably should in some cases.

but the best thing for worker actions: if you hold down (I think) shift key, you can give a worker several commands at once of your choice, and he will go do them over the next several turns. this is my favorite time-saver. so for example you can tell a worker to build a mine, then a railroad on that mine, then move into a forest, build a lumbermill and railroad, then continue the railroad along the route of my choice, etc. really helpful.

 

[Gone Dark]

Hello everyone. I feel I have a pretty solid grasp on how to win on Emperor. I generally play a Standard Size/Speed Pangea map (with all other settings at default). However, I find my games to take a long amount of time to play (but wouldn't want to change the game settings). I tend to micromanage pretty heavily. I generally end up in the city screen for every city every turn. This is reasonable at the beginning of the game, but once I get above 6 cities, it starts to take too much time. I tried using the F1 menu, but for the time being I am just more comfortable in the city screen (but that is something I intend to force myself into using instead).

I also micromanage my workers pretty heavily (trying never to waste a turn of movement when an improvement can be done along the way). It certainly helps me, but it does slow down gameplay some.

Are there any tips people can give to speed up my gameplay? I am unfamiliar with some of the game features (I just recently found out about the ability to use drawing tools inside the game). Are there any ways to set notifications for certain events? Can I flag certain cities 1 turn before/immediately after they grow? Can I be notified when a unit is whippable/buyable? Is there anything about the F1 screen I may not be aware of? Can newly produced military units automatically be set to go to a certain location? Any other tips?

Thanks a lot.

I might be talking out of my ass now, but I think the BUG-mod is what you are looking for. I think it tells you when your cities will grow, when to whip and things like that, and generally gives you more control over what's going on.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=268

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I probably automate things TOO much...but generally I micro like crazy in the early game. Once I have an entire continent to myself though, citizen management and workers get automated (I keep changing improvements off, so I do take the occasional worker into my own hands to make those oil wells etc later on). In my corest of cities (top military production cities, capital, so forth) I still micro them. I also micro the city that is my staging point for naval warfare campaigns. Generally though, letting the workers spam cottages and build roads for all those cities that are placeholders for domination doesn't hurt me.

In other words...if you're at a point where you feel like you have the game won or you have a huge lead, you can automate things to save time. That, or if you're playing on your laptop at school and have no mouse, making micro excessively frustrating .

 

[InFlux5]

Keep in mind that the benefits of micromanagement fade as your empire grows larger. A lost hammer or Worker turn here or there doesn't mean much if you're dealing with hundreds of hammers per turn and all the important improvements have already been built.

Also, use F1. Getting used to the advisor screens is probably the best thing you could do to speed up your game. F1 lets you see which cities really need your attention right away, and lets you zoom to any city directly, saving you from having to scroll all over the place.

F5 is another screen I'm glad to use more and more. The bird's eye view of your military placement gives you a different perspective on things, while the inventory on the right-hand side lets you make quick decisions regarding what to build next in your production cities.

Finally, in many situations using the governor will be fine, and will save you a lot of time.

Take, for example, a production city. Using F1 I monitor the happiness ratio. If I see that this (or any other) production city is at the happy cap, I can

select it from the main screen,
"Turn on Citizen Automation",
"Turn on Emphasize Production",
"Turn on Avoid Growth".

At this point, the city's growth may be stagnated, or it may be scheduled to grow in a large number of turns. If it's the latter, here's a tip:

When "Turn on Avoid Growth" is activated, the city won't grow even if it stores up enough surplus food. This is why, when using this option, you should then turn off the governor, and finally deactivate "Turn on Avoid Growth".

It may sound complicated, but in reality it's a quick series of 3 or 4 clicks. It's certainly faster than going into every city screen every turn. As another example of turning the governor on, then off, say I have a newly-founded city that is going to be a production city, at least in the short term. I want to work food tiles at first, grow the city to the happy cap, then stagnate the growth and work nothing but high-hammer tiles. To do this with the governor, I would

"Turn on Citizen Automation",
"Turn on Emphasize Food",
"Turn off Citizen Automation".

Then, when the city gets to within 1 of the happy cap (which you monitor using F1),

"Turn off Emphasize Food"
"Turn on Emphasize Production".

With the governor turned off (i.e. "Turn off Citizen Automation"), the "Turn on Emphasize Food/Production/Commerce" options will still apply to newly-created citizens when your city grows.

Again, this may all sound like more trouble than it's worth, but once you get used to it it's all very fast. And of course it saves you the time it takes to enter a city screen and manually click each of those citizens around.

One important caveat about the governor is that it is totally inept when it comes to great people, and you should never use the "Turn on Emphasize Great Person" button. Also, when your cities get to be large-ish, the governor may start assigning great people on its own. This is sometimes OK, but usually it's a pain that will force you to stop using the governor in some situations.

 

[oyzar]

Use hof mod or bug or civ alerts directly(the two first include the last, both are rather easy to get with hof mod beeing most widespread). This will tell you alot of things. Like when a city will grow next turn and when people have stuff available for trade. There are a lot of things you just can't speed up though and using half an hour or more per turn in the mid to late game with just intensive playing is not uncommon...

 

[Catan_Settler]

I just try and do the simple things, like setting up large build queues when I actually go into a city screen, grouping my workers up in 2s and 3s, likewise with ships and military but usually bigger stacks. It also helps to put units to sleep whenever possible... I like sleeping ships outside my cultural borders, for instance, rather than constantly patrolling them back and forth. Sure if I was manually moving them every turn, I'd occasionally catch a barbarian attack before it makes landfall, but really that adds sooo much time to a game just moving crap around that really doesn't need to.

 

[vicawoo]

You can scroll through cities by using the left and right arrow keys. I think you can also hotkey cities. I hotkey my workers early so I can cancel their orders every turn.

And as above, if you use shift click with a city, you can make a rally point, and I believe waypoint units, to a front line. You can save build order templates for cities (like granary courthouse barracks). And I believe if you use emphasize, it will apply to new population and not old, so you can work a farm then emphasize commerce to make all new pop work cottages, or emphasize food then switch to emphasize production.

 

[r_rolo1]

...and above all ,disable the combat animations

 

[Winth]

Heh, I have absolutely one opposite problem. I feel like I don't give much of insight into the game, so while my games are pretty fast (2 hours), they are often too cheesy wins or loses.

 

[Wlauzon]

Personally I don't like micromanaging, so about the time I get my 7th or 8th city I put most workers on auto.

 

[LlamaCat]

...and above all ,disable the combat animations

oh yeah is that ever key in the late game! I like to do that for offensive attacks but leave it on for defense so I can see better what is happening to me when I hit next turn. but just doing it for offensive moves saves probably hours in some games. I also never use "see friendly move" or "see enemy moves" ... not sure if it saves any time on hitting next turn, but I just don't get any value out of those options.