Liquidated
Goofed Up on Cough Syrup!
These tips might be simple common sense to some, but I will be explicit for everyone else's 'convenience'.
I planned this to be sort of short but alas, 6 am; sleep would be nice.
---
The main reason the city screen will most likely start slowing on you as you progress though the game is not so much map size/population, but rather the growing number of build options you have at your hands as you advance though the Ages. Not so sure why the game slows down so much when all it is doing is displaying simple icons, but the key to minimizing the rendering time of all those icons is by lowering the total number of build options on screen at any one time. Turing off builds that are not available to the city is a good start just clicking the top left most NO Symbol and there you go! Only what you can build!
If you are like me and only build units from certain towns set up for unit dumping, there's a fast and easy way to speed up the building queue for the other towns, set it up so no units are shown! Early on, you can simply click on the show only aircraft filter and everything goes away up top, it's amazing how fast that speeds things up. If aircraft show up, you can use any combination of any two of air/land/water and again, nothing to see or slow the game down, at least from the Unit side of things.
Just by showing only those buildings constructable and eliminating Unit listings, the build queue is a lot more responsive, even more so if you need it for something like hammers or beakers with relatively small build lists. With cash and culture, it's often best to just sort by magnitude of product from the drop down menu as well as by using filters, It gives you a better idea the best bang for the buck, so to speak, anyway.
---
If you want to build units and not buildings, a really simple way to kill almost all of the building choices (and yet easily restore them) can be managed only using two filters: 'Hide normal buildings' and 'Show only buildings that influence crime'. You end up with... The Palace! (most, if not all times). The two filter icons are right next to each other on the far right side, left of the flammable icon currently bringing a close to the currently available filters. Two clicks and the larger half of the 'lag' is gone!
You can do even better by using the main Unit filters to tailor down to what you want by the main class you are after, not forgetting that if the Unit has no build limit, click on 'Show only units that are unlimited' to the right of the NO Symbol. Sadly this 'show only unlimited' trick does not work for National or special class units like Assassins(Strike teams) or Hunters. One thing you can do though is try and finagle the unit you are after to the top two lines using the main filters as well as the drop down menu options, so you do not have to scroll down to get to them if you need more than one.
---
The nice thing about setting up filters is that the game keeps track of of your settings on a town by town basis, meaning you can set a certain view up for a town and next time you come back, you get the same thing. Keep in mind on Loading back in though, the defaults are back to lagged all to hell by default.
You can skip much of the clicking by going to the Bug Options menu under the Caveman2Cosmos tab and hiding obsolete, unconstructable buildings and untrainable units. What this ends up doing is when restarting from a load file is that the NO buttons start off active as if you went though each town and clicked the button(s) yourself; highly recommended when your town list starts getting long.
To be a bit more complete, I'd be remiss in mentioning that this mod has many menus, not all of which are are immediately noticeable. There's the already mentioned Bug Options Menu sitting between gold and science in the top left, in which many options that use scroll bars are hidden in plain sight. It benefits one greatly to take a close look at what all is available in these menus as major changes can easily be missed.
The other Options menu that so easy to forget exists is the Vanilla options menu accessed via the Esc key. It is here you can drastically reduce the time it takes a turn to play with such things as quick moves and combat and how much of that combat you see by disabling zoom. There are some far reaching automated worker options here that the bug menu fine tunes; when combined, they make automating workers almost palatable.
---
Might as well throw in the rest of the build queue tricks I know of, though without most of these, I have no idea how you are still looking at C2C
In the build queue (Map Mode or City Screen Proper)
Shift adds the build to the bottom of the queue
Control adds the build to the top of the queue
Alt will place the build on infinite loop, with an asterisk appended to the end of the build name.
Keep in mind you can mix Alt with Shift or Control and place a looped build item in its respective place in the queue as denoted by other key pressed. Looped builds cycle though the rest of the build stack only spitting out said looped build once around the queue. This means if you just alt+control click say a Rifleman in front of that 20 item stack of peace loving culture buildings, it will build one Rifleman and then proceed with your original plan of making you neighbor garrison a billion troops inside to keep the town from revolting to your side - er I mean keep building culture buildings.
This once around the poesy deal means though you can do some interesting stuff spitting out matched sets for as long as the limit lasts, or you ask Jane in a panicked voice to 'Stop This Crazy Thing!!!!'
Here's a pair examples to give you an idea.
I love putting 3-5x workers with a recon escort, it will not protect them against Ne'er-do-wells, but animals sure. A dog promoted to sight and anti criminal to ward against ambushers as escort is a good idea for when culture has not expanded to fill the cracks and not all borders are properly covered, but I digress!
Say it's about that time I picked up the all important Military Training Tech for Mercenary Tradition and the delicious Wardogs unit, this just after Monarchy gave me reason to add more towns. I want 5x Workers + a recon escort + dog in that order. This being my first real run of worker crews for a growing Empire, I revolt to Mercenary Traditions for the first and prolly near last time for the maxed exp (worker exp is important!) and the queue looks like this.
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Pack Mule*
Wardogs*
So instead of endlessly clicking worker after worker and trying hard not to lose count (that queue window is so short!) just Alt+Shift click 5 workers (click the pick icon to show only workers), the recon and the dog and Voilà! Once you have as many worker crews as you want, no matter how big or small the worker crew is comprised of, just start deleting lines and you end with the last dog or recon.
Another great use of loop abuse is for tamed animal spam, 15 is the limit, which is just about right for 12 + some love that Monarchy hands you. Just loop the Tamed Wild Boar and seeing as the roads suck and everything is slow, you will cap out at 15 and the build with drop out of the stack ...if you fell asleep at the queue. Beats clicking X number of times on a unit almost impossible to drag to the top of the build list, and yet still be unable to verify what that number really is.
You can save existing Build Queues by pressing Control+(Num) (from 0-9) from the City Screen Proper, recalling the production queue using the same number. Limited and often times confusing as it is, yet it remains God sent even so. This saving of build queues remains unchanged from vanilla Civ4 but this Mod loves to give you vicinity flavored buildings that plague you and your build queue hot-keying habits
You can auto redirect units from a town to any valid tile by activating the map mode view of a city and then Shift right clicking the tile you want to send new Units to. Easy to forget they are going there, but to get things back to normal, just shift right click the tile the town is on which is doing the redirecting.
One last directly Build Queue related bit. If you are dealing with a lagged all to hell and back queue and as you are madly scrolling down a few lines to click the next temple, you often end up getting the build item that was on the first 'page'. The reason this happens is because if you keep the mouse pointer stationary over the icon space you will eventually click after scrolling, the game does not update the pointer's real location post scroll, it's still pointing at page one's build selection you had ample reason to skip in the first place. Jiggle the mouse a bit before clicking after a scroll to wake the pointer up, it will make the icon glow a bit (half the reason the entire thing lags like it does most likely). It doesn't matter how fast everything is or how long between mouse wheel clicks or even how long that mouse pointer sits at the same location, it will nab the item you initially pointed to before scrolling.
---
I know this beyond the scope of the queue but If you have not done so already, look into editing the Domestic Advisor (F1) to your liking by clicking the scroll icon at the bottom. The controls are a bit clunky but they work, just know what they do by hovering the mouse over them; if in doubt, the yellow stroked scroll icon will get you out of edit mode.
If you want a simple symbol that denotes if a town (red - cannot build it), (blue 0 can build it),
hammers: is building it), (green X has built it) or (yellow 0 cannot build it yet because a certain condition has not been met), the 22 width ones are the type you are interested in. Sort by name by clicking Title up top to sort by name to make finding buildings easier. Clicking ID will revert the list to its original state where everything is ordered by its base class, which is better when dealing with stats as opposed to tracking buildings.
One set of stats you might want to first add to one or all of the default pages is [ID 8] though [ID 10] for base commerce, food and hammers respectively. I like base hammers the most because It's hard to tell the potential of a town's production by looking at total hammers, since not all building layouts are the same and prior build overflow screws it all up. Oh, and there's the food to consider too.
Keep in mind that the changes you make in the Domestic Advisor are located in the Mod's own folder (not that 'my document' crap) under UserSettings. The one .txt file in there labeled CustomDomAdv.txt stores your changes. If for some reason you need to reinstall, change PC's or whatever, back up that file or all the changes you eventually did will be lost.
Get to starting new pages and track the crap YOU want to keep tabs on and enjoy a relatively lag free game!
Cheers!
-Liquidated
I planned this to be sort of short but alas, 6 am; sleep would be nice.
---
The main reason the city screen will most likely start slowing on you as you progress though the game is not so much map size/population, but rather the growing number of build options you have at your hands as you advance though the Ages. Not so sure why the game slows down so much when all it is doing is displaying simple icons, but the key to minimizing the rendering time of all those icons is by lowering the total number of build options on screen at any one time. Turing off builds that are not available to the city is a good start just clicking the top left most NO Symbol and there you go! Only what you can build!
If you are like me and only build units from certain towns set up for unit dumping, there's a fast and easy way to speed up the building queue for the other towns, set it up so no units are shown! Early on, you can simply click on the show only aircraft filter and everything goes away up top, it's amazing how fast that speeds things up. If aircraft show up, you can use any combination of any two of air/land/water and again, nothing to see or slow the game down, at least from the Unit side of things.
Just by showing only those buildings constructable and eliminating Unit listings, the build queue is a lot more responsive, even more so if you need it for something like hammers or beakers with relatively small build lists. With cash and culture, it's often best to just sort by magnitude of product from the drop down menu as well as by using filters, It gives you a better idea the best bang for the buck, so to speak, anyway.
---
If you want to build units and not buildings, a really simple way to kill almost all of the building choices (and yet easily restore them) can be managed only using two filters: 'Hide normal buildings' and 'Show only buildings that influence crime'. You end up with... The Palace! (most, if not all times). The two filter icons are right next to each other on the far right side, left of the flammable icon currently bringing a close to the currently available filters. Two clicks and the larger half of the 'lag' is gone!
You can do even better by using the main Unit filters to tailor down to what you want by the main class you are after, not forgetting that if the Unit has no build limit, click on 'Show only units that are unlimited' to the right of the NO Symbol. Sadly this 'show only unlimited' trick does not work for National or special class units like Assassins(Strike teams) or Hunters. One thing you can do though is try and finagle the unit you are after to the top two lines using the main filters as well as the drop down menu options, so you do not have to scroll down to get to them if you need more than one.
---
The nice thing about setting up filters is that the game keeps track of of your settings on a town by town basis, meaning you can set a certain view up for a town and next time you come back, you get the same thing. Keep in mind on Loading back in though, the defaults are back to lagged all to hell by default.
You can skip much of the clicking by going to the Bug Options menu under the Caveman2Cosmos tab and hiding obsolete, unconstructable buildings and untrainable units. What this ends up doing is when restarting from a load file is that the NO buttons start off active as if you went though each town and clicked the button(s) yourself; highly recommended when your town list starts getting long.
To be a bit more complete, I'd be remiss in mentioning that this mod has many menus, not all of which are are immediately noticeable. There's the already mentioned Bug Options Menu sitting between gold and science in the top left, in which many options that use scroll bars are hidden in plain sight. It benefits one greatly to take a close look at what all is available in these menus as major changes can easily be missed.
The other Options menu that so easy to forget exists is the Vanilla options menu accessed via the Esc key. It is here you can drastically reduce the time it takes a turn to play with such things as quick moves and combat and how much of that combat you see by disabling zoom. There are some far reaching automated worker options here that the bug menu fine tunes; when combined, they make automating workers almost palatable.
---
Might as well throw in the rest of the build queue tricks I know of, though without most of these, I have no idea how you are still looking at C2C
In the build queue (Map Mode or City Screen Proper)
Shift adds the build to the bottom of the queue
Control adds the build to the top of the queue
Alt will place the build on infinite loop, with an asterisk appended to the end of the build name.
Keep in mind you can mix Alt with Shift or Control and place a looped build item in its respective place in the queue as denoted by other key pressed. Looped builds cycle though the rest of the build stack only spitting out said looped build once around the queue. This means if you just alt+control click say a Rifleman in front of that 20 item stack of peace loving culture buildings, it will build one Rifleman and then proceed with your original plan of making you neighbor garrison a billion troops inside to keep the town from revolting to your side - er I mean keep building culture buildings.
This once around the poesy deal means though you can do some interesting stuff spitting out matched sets for as long as the limit lasts, or you ask Jane in a panicked voice to 'Stop This Crazy Thing!!!!'
Here's a pair examples to give you an idea.
I love putting 3-5x workers with a recon escort, it will not protect them against Ne'er-do-wells, but animals sure. A dog promoted to sight and anti criminal to ward against ambushers as escort is a good idea for when culture has not expanded to fill the cracks and not all borders are properly covered, but I digress!
Say it's about that time I picked up the all important Military Training Tech for Mercenary Tradition and the delicious Wardogs unit, this just after Monarchy gave me reason to add more towns. I want 5x Workers + a recon escort + dog in that order. This being my first real run of worker crews for a growing Empire, I revolt to Mercenary Traditions for the first and prolly near last time for the maxed exp (worker exp is important!) and the queue looks like this.
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Work Mule*
Pack Mule*
Wardogs*
So instead of endlessly clicking worker after worker and trying hard not to lose count (that queue window is so short!) just Alt+Shift click 5 workers (click the pick icon to show only workers), the recon and the dog and Voilà! Once you have as many worker crews as you want, no matter how big or small the worker crew is comprised of, just start deleting lines and you end with the last dog or recon.
Another great use of loop abuse is for tamed animal spam, 15 is the limit, which is just about right for 12 + some love that Monarchy hands you. Just loop the Tamed Wild Boar and seeing as the roads suck and everything is slow, you will cap out at 15 and the build with drop out of the stack ...if you fell asleep at the queue. Beats clicking X number of times on a unit almost impossible to drag to the top of the build list, and yet still be unable to verify what that number really is.
You can save existing Build Queues by pressing Control+(Num) (from 0-9) from the City Screen Proper, recalling the production queue using the same number. Limited and often times confusing as it is, yet it remains God sent even so. This saving of build queues remains unchanged from vanilla Civ4 but this Mod loves to give you vicinity flavored buildings that plague you and your build queue hot-keying habits
You can auto redirect units from a town to any valid tile by activating the map mode view of a city and then Shift right clicking the tile you want to send new Units to. Easy to forget they are going there, but to get things back to normal, just shift right click the tile the town is on which is doing the redirecting.
One last directly Build Queue related bit. If you are dealing with a lagged all to hell and back queue and as you are madly scrolling down a few lines to click the next temple, you often end up getting the build item that was on the first 'page'. The reason this happens is because if you keep the mouse pointer stationary over the icon space you will eventually click after scrolling, the game does not update the pointer's real location post scroll, it's still pointing at page one's build selection you had ample reason to skip in the first place. Jiggle the mouse a bit before clicking after a scroll to wake the pointer up, it will make the icon glow a bit (half the reason the entire thing lags like it does most likely). It doesn't matter how fast everything is or how long between mouse wheel clicks or even how long that mouse pointer sits at the same location, it will nab the item you initially pointed to before scrolling.
---
I know this beyond the scope of the queue but If you have not done so already, look into editing the Domestic Advisor (F1) to your liking by clicking the scroll icon at the bottom. The controls are a bit clunky but they work, just know what they do by hovering the mouse over them; if in doubt, the yellow stroked scroll icon will get you out of edit mode.
If you want a simple symbol that denotes if a town (red - cannot build it), (blue 0 can build it),
hammers: is building it), (green X has built it) or (yellow 0 cannot build it yet because a certain condition has not been met), the 22 width ones are the type you are interested in. Sort by name by clicking Title up top to sort by name to make finding buildings easier. Clicking ID will revert the list to its original state where everything is ordered by its base class, which is better when dealing with stats as opposed to tracking buildings. One set of stats you might want to first add to one or all of the default pages is [ID 8] though [ID 10] for base commerce, food and hammers respectively. I like base hammers the most because It's hard to tell the potential of a town's production by looking at total hammers, since not all building layouts are the same and prior build overflow screws it all up. Oh, and there's the food to consider too.
Spoiler :
Keep in mind that the changes you make in the Domestic Advisor are located in the Mod's own folder (not that 'my document' crap) under UserSettings. The one .txt file in there labeled CustomDomAdv.txt stores your changes. If for some reason you need to reinstall, change PC's or whatever, back up that file or all the changes you eventually did will be lost.
Get to starting new pages and track the crap YOU want to keep tabs on and enjoy a relatively lag free game!
Cheers!
-Liquidated
