Managing Wide Empires with less Effort

[Wulfram G.T.]

Do you guys also have the problem of managing a wide empire? Any tips or mods?
Like when i have for example 70 cities and 50 trade routes and every turn i have to build something and reassign trade routes the turns take long, it's teddious and annoying.
I cannot understand why they didn't implement build queues as well as auto-reassigning trade routes. With the wide focus if you want to play optimal you should anyway build a city everywhere where you can have at least one district. But i already razed semi-good cities just so i don't have another city to bother with.
Especially in the end of the game my smaller cities only ever produce gold/science/culture projects while my good cities produce other stuff. Why can I not just tell a city to queue that project infinite times?

 

[joncnunn]

Most of what you want are in UI mods: https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ6-creation-customization.541/
In addition the steam workshop went live with the latest patch.

 

[Art Morte]

"There are mods" is such a boring answer -.-

On the other hand, I've never understood the appeal of playing huge maps where you have 70 cities. Meh.

 

[DavDarkelf]

I've never had that many Cities! However CQUI has a ton of improvements that will make your life a lot easier
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=870911250

 

[ShakaKhan]

I just figure that since more cities equals more power, there's less and less need to micromanage as the game progresses. At the start of the game, you need every last yield that you can grab and need to think strategically about which yields to sacrifice for others (ex. 3 gold here or 1 hammer there? should we halve the rate we grow to add an extra 2 culture per turn? etc.) Later on, you just lock the governor preferences and focus on what's going on outside of your cities. Yes, the governor is not assigning tiles optimally, and that compulsive civilization voice in your head is screaming at you to manually assign the tiles, but you have to ignore it. Since you meticulously micromanaged early game to reach absolute optimum efficiency, you've put yourself in a position where you can win convincingly with mediocre efficiency from here on out.

I usually have three stages of the game:
1.) early game (roughly 10 cities or less) - quickly scan over the entire empire at the end of every turn to see who's going to grow and assign that new population point at the beginning of the next turn, even comparing food vs. production yields to determine if a build will still finish the same turn when switching to more food/less hammers.. When any trade route finishes, look at each city to determine who needs the boost most.
2.) middle game (10-16 cities, roughly) - check the "view reports" screen frequently to ensure housing and amenities are where they need to be. Every ten turns (turns ending in 0), check all cities' tile assignments to make sure they are where I want them. Towards the end of this phase, make sure each city has the governor focus that I want.
3.) end game (16 or 20 cities or more) - ignore assignments.

One other thing that helps me is setting two rules for locking tiles. First, only lock tiles that are "finished" (have improvements, or will never get an improvement such as an oasis or NW tile) and second, only lock tiles that I expect to run every turn until the game ends.

 

[Victoria]

I had 80 cities and gave up, its just too much of a grind because there is no challenge, you are just going through the motions.
I did lock civilians into useless tiles so the city neither grew nor had much production then I would leave it to build a wonder or a district.
A very appalling way to try and make the game more bearable....

 

[Siptah]

As I already posted elsewhere, a build queue doesn't make much sense with civ vi. Only if you accept that you are playing incredibly inefficient. There are a few things that usually disrupt long-term planning in your cities (yes, you can technically calculate them all beforehand and adjust the build queue):
- housing capacity reached
- amenities low (but this is less a factor for me)
- population growth allowing a new district (which also enables new buildings)
- finite charges for builders
My memory is good enough to let me have a plan of what to do next for around 20 cities, and I do something different in ~ half of the cases because of one of the above reasons. So a build queue that I don't recheck at least every 2 finished buildings would seriously harm my empire.

As for repeatable trade routes. Yes, please. (the better trade screen mod does this btw) This is such a great help in the later stages of the game.

 

[Wulfram G.T.]

As I already posted elsewhere, a build queue doesn't make much sense with civ vi. Only if you accept that you are playing incredibly inefficient. There are a few things that usually disrupt long-term planning in your cities (yes, you can technically calculate them all beforehand and adjust the build queue):
- housing capacity reached
- amenities low (but this is less a factor for me)
- population growth allowing a new district (which also enables new buildings)
- finite charges for builders
My memory is good enough to let me have a plan of what to do next for around 20 cities, and I do something different in ~ half of the cases because of one of the above reasons. So a build queue that I don't recheck at least every 2 finished buildings would seriously harm my empire.

As for repeatable trade routes. Yes, please. (the better trade routes mod does this btw) This is such a great help in the later stages of the game.

I think build queues would make really much sense; just you would have to assign the districts and wonders of course.

In civ 5 i always use build queues. I change them oftren, ofc, move sth up or down or delete dependign on current situations. So you could queue the three buildings you want. Then you remark "ah i can build a new district or wonder". So you just add it and move it up the queue and go on.

Build queues would really be most useful for domination end games. Then most cities only have a commercial or campus district and make the projects. So every turn i have to reassign the project for like 5 cities and scroll down for all of them instead of just saying "produce gold or science for the rest of the game".
I will have like 2 - 10 unit pumping cities in which i have to assign a new unit every 1 - 3 turns instead of just queuing some units.
Also for peaceful science/culture games I have like 4 "good" cities that i manage manually and the rest just pumps out projects towards endgame.

So it's not about not remembering what i wanted to do but about convenience.

 

[Wulfram G.T.]

A possible solution beside queues could also be to insert a puppet governor that builds buildings and projects but never any districts, wonders or units. But you can still give a manual order to the city if needed.

Fun fact: When playing with my girlfriend I usually make aggressive expansion (also for science or culture vics) and she tries to play peaceful and tall; so i have much longer for my turns with my 30 cities than she has with her 6 cities and then she's annoyed xD

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I had 80 cities and gave up, its just too much of a grind because there is no challenge, you are just going through the motions.
I did lock civilians into useless tiles so the city neither grew nor had much production then I would leave it to build a wonder or a district.
A very appalling way to try and make the game more bearable....

Once upon a time, civ had conventions that made managing 50+ empire civs and still playing a turn in under 60 seconds while at war a realistic thing to do. Without mods, you could make it so a city produced while never bothering you again, or even save a "production queue" to make new cities build all of a set of things they don't have yet, and not prompt you again until finished.

As I already posted elsewhere, a build queue doesn't make much sense with civ vi. Only if you accept that you are playing incredibly inefficient.

Shaving an hour off a playthrough you know you're going to win is a valid real-life time efficiency trade-off, especially when the marginal value lost in-game is relatively small.

And I don't believe for a second it was impractical to implement mechanically. If they cared about the user experience they could have done it, just like they could have done what the UI mods have done in vanilla. AAA developers shouldn't be getting their UI quality dumpstered by a couple volunteers in short order, or underperform their own standards in sequels.

In civ 4 you could queue any number of units/buildings without even entering the city screen. In civ 5 and onward Firaxis abandoned sensible UI and has not returned it since. Civ 6 UI is at the level I'd expect in an alpha game, not in an alleged AAA release title. It is really, really noticeable when you have 30-50+ cities and there's no excuse for it.

 

[joncnunn]

For that matter, it would be trivial for them to now steal the code within the UI mods that added building queues, a better trade route screen now that these exist in UI mods.

From a UI perceptive, the built in game isn't really playable past a few cities, but the good news is the franchise has enough dedicated players to have already made UI mods making it playable.

Housing capacity: It's absolutely predictable when your city is going to reach the 50% & 75% thresholds and so you can place the item that increases it in the correct spot; or if it later turned out you were wrong on the timing shuffle it around in the queue.
The same thing applies to amenities when you are at peace, and less important anyway.

I'm not seeing the significance of builders having charges in relation to queues. In the case of sea improvements, that functionality has been around since Civ I (called a work boat which had a charge of 1 for the previous versions) which all had queues.
With charges you space them accordingly; and with civics you make your best guess and then shuffle around as needed.

 

[spfun]

This is why I liked puppets.