Marathon too slow?

[CivIVMonger]

I know world size has alot to do with it, but even epic game speed is too fast sometimes, I personaly LOVE Marathon as you sorta get the "feel" for your game.
and you can sit, relax, and play civ without rushing through one thing and then another, and the ancient era is only, what 10 minutes on epic? (once again, map size is involved) on marathon a good 30 minutes is put into the ancient era, also, ever spent the ENTIRE classical period building an army but never using it until the middle ages? Marathon is not to slow on production if you have alot of hammers. Idk, epic is still fun but but it is supposed the slower game speed, quick however, almost gives me a headache with all the "you have constructed a Tank in this city" and "what would you like to research next" (end turn) elapsed time 40 years, coming at you a 100MPH.
if this even matters to you, go ahead and post. just thought this would be an enteresting topic.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Marathon gives a before-modifiers 50% boost to all units, but it can still be fun sometimes.

I try to avoid it b/c it makes games easier for me, but more importantly because it's hard on my computers...even the laptop. After a while turns bog down. Mid-late game marathon can be a nightmare.

Normal and epic both allow for successful warfare in all eras on most difficulties, although medieval can be pretty slow if they get castles.

 

[Ghpstage]

Idk, epic is still fun but but it is supposed the slower game speed, quick however, almost gives me a headache with all the "you have constructed a Tank in this city" and "what would you like to research next" (end turn) elapsed time 40 years, coming at you a 100MPH.

Theres a few commands that can help gereatly reduce the amount of fiddling around with cities and units that you need to do:

With tech you can stop this problem from ever happening by creating research queues in the tech advisor screen.

For production, you can manage build queues using
-Shift + click to add a unit/building to the back of the queue,
-Cntrl + click adds it to the front of the queue,
-Alt + click repeat builds units (tanks forever )
You can combine the commands to have a city produce Tank->Infantry->Marine->Artillery and cycle through them all with you never having to look at the "you have constructed a Tank in this city" popup ever again!

Better yet you can select many cities by shift clicking them and have them all produce the new build queue you create.
You can also create a rally point for cities by shift right clicking a tile away from the city, all units produced in the city will then head there automatically. This can also be used on multiple cities at the same time with shift selecting.

Hope it helps

 

[Blaarg]

I know world size has alot to do with it, but even epic game speed is too fast sometimes, I personaly LOVE Marathon as you sorta get the "feel" for your game.
and you can sit, relax, and play civ without rushing through one thing and then another, and the ancient era is only, what 10 minutes on epic? (once again, map size is involved) on marathon a good 30 minutes is put into the ancient era, also, ever spent the ENTIRE classical period building an army but never using it until the middle ages? Marathon is not to slow on production if you have alot of hammers. Idk, epic is still fun but but it is supposed the slower game speed, quick however, almost gives me a headache with all the "you have constructed a Tank in this city" and "what would you like to research next" (end turn) elapsed time 40 years, coming at you a 100MPH.
if this even matters to you, go ahead and post. just thought this would be an enteresting topic.

I understand exactly what you mean. The eras fly by too quickly even on Epic.

 

[CivIVMonger]

I understand exactly what you mean. The eras fly by too quickly even on Epic.

A Believer! (just kidding)
i'm glad you understand!

 

[Stoney the I]

I second OP. I enjoy civ games more when the game is longer.

 

[katipunero]

if they had a setting for about 5,000 turns of play--appropriately labeled ADDICTION!, right after marathon speed, I'd play it.

 

[hexem3117]

I like the games to be shorter; the goal for me is to see how quickly I can win and the domination that results

Marathon takes too long, and it bugs me when I look at the city screen and see that every building is going to take turns of hitting space bar...I guess it's nice for warmongering, though.

My 2 cents!

 

[Joecoolyo]

I actually think Marathon (now that I have gotten used to it) is too fast, I want slower, longer, more epic games!

 

[3 EMS]

I only play marathon. Every other spped seems too fast.

 

[Gooblah]

Even though the unit cost is messed up on Marathon, I still like it - it creates a feel of epic warfare.

 

[LegionSteve]

I like marathon speed. I experimented with epic speed recently, but decided I prefer marathon and went back to that. I understand that it messes with the balance, making war a lot easier. But on faster speeds I find the culture victory much too easy compared to the others, so making war based victories more of a useful option seems like a good thing to me.

 

[charon2112]

I'm all for long slow games, but what I don't like about marathon is that it takes forever to build anything. I want a game with more turn, but I don't want to just keep hitting end turn and having it take 30 turns to build a worker.

In fact, I would do away with matching game turns to real years (4000BC to 2050AD) since Jesus is irrelevant in this game anyway--you're remaking history and that doesn't always include Jesus. Just start on year zero and start counting up. the different eras could be controlled by what techs you have researched. It would be so simple to have the different speeds then. regular could be ten years per turn, epic, 5 years, marathon 2 years. Or something like that...

 

[Camano]

Hi, I'm pretty new to the game. I got a question that kind of pertains to this topic. Is there any way to jump ahead multiple turns if nothing is going on? I ask this because I was playing around with a marathon game and like an above poster said, I got sick of waiting 20 turns for a worker to build. In these instances can you just skip ahead until the next unit, building, or tech is complete? I'm assuming not because the computer still needs to do his stuff during the turn. Anyways, even if you can do this I probably wouldn't want to, due to the time it would take to load 20 turns. One turn is bad enough sometimes.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

What??? Normal games already take a month to play! I would not be able to finish anything slower! (Though to be honest, the victory screen normally says I play anywhere from 5-7 hours, so I could play through games if I didn't have stuff to do like housework, softball, road trips, gardening, having fun with the gf, etc.)

 

[Jaroth]

Normal ftw.

Also, I like to play many different games with a variety of randomly chosen leaders.

Plus once you've played the game enough, "been there, done that", you tend to just want to cut to the chase.

Also, once you get used to it, Normal is a great speed to play at... challenging and balanced. +1 movement speed is more important... anarchy is more damaging... taking advantage of opportunities that arise is more important and hesitation/undecisiveness is more punishing... etc.

I feel the game was balanced around Normal speed. (Also, Marathon wasn't originally included when the game came out, it was added later on)

I used to be a loyal supporter of Marathon when it was first added too, lol. Once I opened up and tried faster speeds, I realized what I was missing.

 

[harry_flashman]

play on epic but ideally id like a speed half way between epic and marathon.

warring is easier on marathon, but it can be a long wait to get to chemistry when your Great Lighthouse economy is being blockaded by frigates...

 

[eris]

Marathon all the way. I especially love how some people consider it cheating that the unit costs are effectively different. They are right, but torquing off the purists is just one more joy to something I would already be doing.

 

[omnimutant]

I always Play Marathon and if there was another speed that did like 1 year per turn in even in the BC era's I'd play it! Marathon allows for way more strategic advantage(for both you and the AI). Playing Marathon on Monarch with 6-8 Foes on a Big map games usually take me about 2-3 days tops.(depending on how lucky i get) Once I get my new rig in I'll be cranking things up for The epic Battle of all time (for me anyway). 34 Civ, Huge, Conquest/Dom, Raging Barbs, Some sort of Uber Land Map Like Boreal or Rain Forest, and Defiantly Marathon(once I find that tweak to up the number of AI Players). Unfortunately my PC just can't handle that right now.

 

[Crusher1]

90% of my games revolve around tedious build orders through 1AD and specific "timing" in conjunction with techs so Marathon would be out of the question. Definitely Normal, until I play a "real" game where it's 50/50 Normal/Epic depending on the strategy I plan to use before.

When I want to abuse the whip/heavy warmonger I'll throw in the rediculous Marathon to get over on the system and make my play look Godly.