Tips for cutting down on turn times

[Pearman]

Long turn times towards the ends of games can be a hassle, so list some good ways to cut down on turn times.

One is to automate your workers, you can use specific hotkeys to automate them to different tasks, such as cleaning pollution or clearing jungle.

 

[chiefpaco]

- Not only automate your workers, but take off "show automatic moves" and "animate automatic moves". Doesn't help greatly, but near the end, I don't care what my workers do.

- If you're not fighting, take off "Animate Battles". Then you won't have to watch someone elses.

- If most of your cities are really large & all the squares are taken so excess people are entertainers/tax/scientists, let the governors manage your citizen moods. They automatically handle happiness so your city doesn't go into disorder (barring major changes to your empire, trade, war, etc) and reassign your workers to polluted squares.

- Getting used to stack movement is helping. Also Ctrl-Shift-G is Goto city so you don't have to do excess scrolling. And the new Improve nearest city, I think Ctrl-Shift-I.

- Go for a Space Race. Press Enter & watch the turns pass...

 

[Dutchman]

Thankx for te tips, but does anybody have a list of al the shortcuts, so I can also use them!
thankx

 

[Hurricane]

Just look them up in the manual.

 

[Megalou]

It seems to me that managing citizens moods is partly crap. If you lose a luxury, or if war weariness increases, the governor will not anticipate this before your next turn: you will still go into civil disorder, lose one turn of production (and risk cultural takeover) before he reacts. To anticipate, you have to remove the governor (which includes a time wasting dialog box ) and adjust the happiness yourself.

Am I wrong?

 

[Ouchgeddon]

Russia's million and Rome's 2 billion troops are tramping on my lawn, and I can't shoo them off in case they turn about and bite me. 1 minute waits in between turns, or all out (losing) war?

 

[BillChin]

Yes, automate workers. Use the city governors to manage happiness and manage production, they are not perfect, but saves a lot of time. Use the sentry command (Y or Shift Y) to avoid unexpected attacks by posting a few sentry units in strategic locations. Turn off all animations, turn off all show moves. Use J for stacked movement. Turn on repeat last unit build on preferences, to crank out tanks or bombers or whatever.

 

[Tunnel Vision]

Get an AMD 1.6 Ghz processor with a gig of ram.

 

[Herse]

Here is one that I found completely by accident. I haven't seen it in any list of key commands and it is not in the manual. If you want to see other civs move, in case they do anything interesting, but you get impatient watching them, you can speed up their movements on screen by holding down the SHIFT key while they are moving. It works like fast forward and you can stop it at any time just by releasing the key. Good for speeding up allies and then watching enemy, or potential enemy, moves.

 

[Pearman]

Is there a way to make it so that a dialog box doesn't pop up every time something has been produced? And also, it seems as if the default for new productions after producing a unit is cannon/artillery, is there a way to change that to, say, next cultural building, or next commerce building?

 

[basta72]

I use an AMD 1.7 Ghz processor with half a gig of RAM and there are still 5-10 minutes or more waiting between turns on the largests maps. I have lots of free RAM so more than 512Mb wont help me.

Actually, Im writing this just to kill some time while waiting

 

[BillChin]

Originally posted by Pearman
Is there a way to make it so that a dialog box doesn't pop up every time something has been produced? And also, it seems as if the default for new productions after producing a unit is cannon/artillery, is there a way to change that to, say, next cultural building, or next commerce building?

Yes, I think you can turn off the build queue pop up in preferences. I do not see it in the manual (page 195), but I am sure that I did it by accident one time.

I believe you can use the second governor screen to turn off unit building and turn on improvements (page 109). Depending on the number of cities you have this may or may not be worth it as many cities are cranking out units and some will want buildings. There is no easy way that I know of, to divide the empire into those two groups.

 

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by Megalou
It seems to me that managing citizens moods is partly crap. If you lose a luxury, or if war weariness increases, the governor will not anticipate this before your next turn: you will still go into civil disorder, lose one turn of production (and risk cultural takeover) before he reacts. To anticipate, you have to remove the governor (which includes a time wasting dialog box ) and adjust the happiness yourself.

Am I wrong?

Yes, you are wrong. The governor will adjust.

 

[FirstNoel]

I kind of like the Govenor for Citizens moods...it acts like Prozac. They never get too happy or sad...
But the Govenor is a little slow on the uptake when it comes to war. It re-acts to the citizens, it can't seem to predict that the turn after the war is started that the citizens might be cranky.

It would be nice if it could do that...but that's offtopic for this post.


Sean D.

 

[Megalou]

Hurricane:

Yes, you are wrong. The governor will adjust.

Reading is not your strong part? Yes, the governer will adjust, but AFTER the city has gone into civil disorder. I double-checked this by selling a marketplace, i.e. creating unhappy citizens, while the governor was controlling moods. Sure thing: the city went into civil disorder, one turn of production was lost and the city was in danger of cultural takeover (theoretically).

FirstNoel:

It would be nice if it could do that...but that's offtopic for this post.

Off-topic? This makes the function partly useless. What if you're bulding the Apollo Program in a tight game and the city goes into disorder? Otherwise it would have been a good time-saver.

I'll finish of with a picture of myself right now:

Cheers,

 

[BillChin]

There are some things that the governor adjusts to before disorder, some after. Some of things the governor can handle on the fly include: an increase in population, garrison units entering or leaving the city.

Some other things have a one turn delay, these include: increased war weariness, the addition or loss of a luxury or a happiness building. The governor will handle it, but one turn after the disorder.

Overall, governors save a great deal of time.

 

[MrFrodo]

I use the governor for mood management all the time,
because I can't handle the micro-management and it
greatly speeds up the game. The biggest downfall to it is
what Megalou mentions...

The governor will not prevent a turn of civil disorder from loosing luxuries *or* from war weariness. Probably wouldn't for having a
cathedral destroyed either (but I'm not sure).

However, the governor *will* keep you from going into
disorder due to adding another unhappy citizen. Which happens *all the time* if you don't have the governor on and don't pay attention to every freakin' city.

So it is well worth it to use the governor for happiness control
to speed up the game, unless you like to micromanage.

If I am building a really important wonder, I will turn the governor off on that city and put the exact number of citizens required on mines or entertainers to get
zero growth. This way the city produces as much as it can, can't become unhappy from growth and hopefully has enough
entertainers to avoid disorder if I loose a luxury or war weariness gets worse. The governor will never "maximize production" to
this extent so you have to do it for them. It can make a huge
difference in the number of turns it takes to build a wonder if
you have a few unused mines on Hills/Mnts in your city radius.

 

[BabylImmortal]

Originally posted by Herse
...you can speed up their movements on screen by holding down the SHIFT key while they are moving. It works like fast forward and you can stop it at any time just by releasing the key. Good for speeding up allies and then watching enemy, or potential enemy, moves.

Good point, I do this too (holding down shift). Another thing that I do when playing hugh pangea maps w/ 16 civs is to disable the friendly civ movements, so they occur out of sight. But this isn't always a good option. You sometimes lose the 1 or 2 turns notice you may get that a civ is abt to declare war on you.

 

[linjon]

i was trying to get to tanks, so came back to republic from communism- i had left right as war weariness was killing my empire and let the gov manage moods. i think just 1 city went into disorder- ( forgot to build a cathedral or something). the gov let some of my cities starve creating entertainers, but i never got a weariness related disruption- like when all my happys go to content causing a disruption.,