Tips to Speed up Game in Late Stages

collin_stp

Warlord
Joined
Jan 15, 2004
Messages
116
Location
Athens, Greece
I never saw anything on this in these forums, so I decided to add my two cents. This will not solve your slow computer, but will make management faster. I am sorry if I repeat what many people have said earlier.

I always hated late industrial age through modern age, because I usually have a ton of units and artillery or planes. I usually wouldn't play large maps just because of this, but I have found ways to speed things up.

First of all, I found the use of rally points very nice. In late Industrial age, your core cities (the ones producing the most units) are usually connected by rail, so a single central location to gather your units helps. If you build planes, it may get more tricky, since you may want to immediately rebase them closer to combat, but for tanks and modern armour, this works pretty well.

Second, for newly captured cities at this point, they usually are too corrupt to be of any use for building units, and I just like to build infrastructure (that is just me, though). I find that setting the production governor to only build structures helps a lot (you don't have to follow their advice, but then they don't always just want to spit out units which you will have to control).

Third, use stack movement were appropriate, but this is obvious.

Finally, when on the attack, and especially if you have lots of bombers, I turn off "animate battles" in the preference menu. This really speeds up attacks, and especially bombing runs. I turn it back on at the end of my turn, so I can see what is going on easier when the AI attacks me, but having this turned off, and just using the "b" hotkey, you can have 30-40 bombers/artillery bombard in no time at all.

These are mostly helpful when you are trying to mop up the AI, which I would usually not do because it was so tedious, but with these, it becomes significantly faster.
 
Good hints, I hate the stage where the game is basically won and it is just about how fast you finish, too.
 
Turning off animations is also a key to not getting bored. It's fun the first few times, and it's fun to see the animations of new units (I'm currently playing my first C3C game, so I have them turned on). But it is VERY tedious, especially when you have Britain for a neighbor and they keep shuffling their enormous armada of Man-O-Wars back and forth through your territory.

As for the captured cities, I employ the same tac as always: I bombard down to size 1 and take it (or I take it and let them starve...), garrison with defensive units, rush a temple and get on with my conquest.
 
Hold the shift key down when it is cycling through the opponents turns. This dramatically speeds up the animations... I also use this for my automated workers.
 
collin_stp said:


Good points.

BTW is there function - hotkey that you can use to bombard your stack of cannons/artillery its a tad boring firing one by one when you've a big stack??


Cheers
 
bholed said:
BTW is there function - hotkey that you can use to bombard your stack of cannons/artillery its a tad boring firing one by one when you've a big stack??

Cheers

Unfortunately, there is no such command :( Turning off the battle animations should speed bombardment up though, I'll try it next time I play!
I'm always using artillery, in every attack situation (be it on a single unit or a city), so I'd definitely like something like a stack bombardment function!
 
Berrern said:
Unfortunately, there is no such command :( Turning off the battle animations should speed bombardment up though, I'll try it next time I play!
I'm always using artillery, in every attack situation (be it on a single unit or a city), so I'd definitely like something like a stack bombardment function!

Also, as I mentioned, just using the B hotkey can really speed it up. Have mouse over your enemy, type B and click, and you will go through your arty so fast that you won't realize how many you have.
 
I don't know why they didn't just let artillery bombard a neighbor's square by pressing the direction of them. Okay, wouldn't help with bombers and maybe not artillery but the choice would be nice.
 
Worker stack commands...

stack irrigate, stack clean pollution, etc..

bad post..mod please delete
 
Thorn said:
Does anyone know if there is a global wakeup command for all units in sleep mode? There are times I would like to use the sleep mode for a lot of units but I would hate to have to go around and wake them all up. A global wakeup command would really speed things up.
No, there is not.
Between wars, I stockpile my non-garrison units on discrete tiles (e.g., tanks on one, infantry on another). Cities producing such units have rally points set appropriately. This way it is easy to wake all and dispatch them to the front when the time comes.

Some units obscure any pollution on the tile, so I put their rally point on a tile outside of a city radius.
 
Barker said:
Hold the shift key down when it is cycling through the opponents turns. This dramatically speeds up the animations... I also use this for my automated workers.

Better yet, hit Caps Lock and let your finger relax. :)
 
Although this is generally useless as you don't know if you're going to end up having to sit through tonnes of AI moves until it happens, and if you press caps lock whilst the AI is doing its moves it doesn't come on until the AI are finished.
 
hmm, for the corrupt cities, don't build buildings, build wealth. most of your cities will have only 1 uncorrupt shield so building anything, even a temple will take too long to be worth any value.

And if ur corrupt cities grow reall fast, make all your citizens into some kind of city workers such as scientists or tax collecters. However make them work in your specific trait field, for example, if you are commerical make your citizens tax collecters rather than scientists as you get a bonus for your trait.

Thats my $0.02
 
Mr. Do said:
Although this is generally useless as you don't know if you're going to end up having to sit through tonnes of AI moves until it happens, and if you press caps lock whilst the AI is doing its moves it doesn't come on until the AI are finished.

It might be time to upgrade your computer. After I press capslock, no more than four more AI moves and it kicks in. A really nice feature they added. My pinky got tired sometimes. :D
 
I turn off in preferences "Stop orders on enemy units". This allows me to setup my automatic bombard on catapults (which never works if this is on since a catapult always needs to be next to an enemy unit) and artillery and they will bombard away and never break the order. (Court marshall ya know:))
 
Another way to minimize micromanagement in the Modern Age (only) is to build Mass Transit and Recycling Center, which will reduce the metro's pollution to 2. Less micro of workers, which I never automate.

I just rediscovered Recycling Center and found that factory, offshore platform, airport, iron works, commercial docks, ... EVERYTHING is reduced to one! :D
 
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