Two mini-techniques useful for troops management

[lymond]

Yep, this is useful. I've kinda done the flushing thing for years though not always as cleanly as described, but I do use group and ungroup a lot. The Health Quarantine thing though I've never done and that looks extremely handy when one fights a lot. Ha...I'm always fumbling around trying to separate my wounded from the stack. Granted sometimes you do have some slightly wounded dudes continue on.

 

[pomthom]

Happy to help

 

[obsolete]

Never used CTRL+H, but will experiment on Friday's relaxation game-night

 

[NickGabben]

Isn't that one of the tips at startup?

 

[pomthom]

Isn't that one of the tips at startup?

Not that I know of but then again I've never read them

 

[ArchGhost]

Ctrl+H is a good one, it's a lifesaver when managing many tens or even hundreds of units, and is equally useful for smaller groups.

I'd like to throw out another little micro tip thing:
Ever notice how if you group units together and give them a move order, if they have differing numbers of movement left (or in the case of Mobility promos and certain terrain along the path) that the ENTIRE stack will halt when the lowest move unit runs out of movement?

Your unit focus may also get stuck on the stack until you select something else, which you can also see a lot when giving order to workers already out of movement. Essentially the game queues the action but doesn't purge the unit selection.

While a quick and easy fix for this issue with a single unit/worker is to just repeat the order and click again, mixed movement stacks that halt in this way will NOT allow the units with remaining MP to continue on. They will queue the movement action and sleep for the rest of the turn, no matter how many times they are ordered to move when the entire mixed stack is selected. Even Ctrl+A (order all global actions outstanding to complete) won't do it.

It looks like this:

Spoiler :

Normally you'd have to go and manually deselect all the units with no movement from the group and command the remaining selected units again in order to get them to continue on and not waste their movement points for this turn.

A quicker (and less frustrating, given the interface screwups and latency especially in LARGE groups or late game in general) way is to simply use the Go-to button/shortcuts, Ctrl+G (same unit type) and Alt+G (all units of any type).

Simply press which is more appropriate and the game will automatically deselect the move-less units from the group, and collect all movement-eligible units into a new group as well as starting a movement command for them, so one more click will advance the units forward again instead of multiple deselection clicks.

You can even repeat this if they stop again, in order to make sure all units that can continue to move use their movement point for the turn. It "weeds out" the move-less units in much the same way as the Ctrl-H command removes injured units.

BTW, I play with the Right Click Menu option, so this makes this issue even more frustrating as all movement commands require 2 clicks (selection of waypoint, confirmation) but the stack halting issue still occurs regardless, so hopefully this is useful.

 

[Pangaea]

Ever notice how if you group units together and give them a move order, if they have differing numbers of movement left (or in the case of Mobility promos and certain terrain along the path) that the ENTIRE stack will halt when the lowest move unit runs out of movement?

This is a good point, and something that will happen from time to time. What I usually do is just double-click on the stack. Units with remaining move points will then get selected (as a group?) and I can move them (obviously this won't work if they happen to be *inside* a city).

Sometimes the only unit with more move points is the 3-move superhealer, which I naturally don't want to remove from the stack. But at other times, typically when you are sending military units to the front to attack, they will have varying amounts of move points left when they get to the front city (for instance). Or let's say you have 6 workers in a stack and are moving from plot to plot to 1-turn workshops. Then you research Steam Power, and now need fewer workerturns.

 

[NickGabben]

Not that I know of but then again I've never read them

Indeed it is:

Took forever to get the tip to appear, but there it is!

 

[pomthom]

Took forever to get the tip to appear, but there it is!

Well at least I gave it a cool name?

 

[Pangaea]

Related so I'll go out on a limb and post it here.

In case you're not aware of it, in addition to these troop management shortkeys, you can also do much the same for building queues. For instance, let's say you're playing an ocean-rich map and are founding many cities. Typically you want a Granary, Lighthouse (and Courthouse). Queue those up in one city (with Shift-click). Then hit Ctrl + 1. This queue is now saved. Hit "1" in another city, and everything in the queue is copied.

Presumably you can have 10 different queues (0-9), but one or two is probably sufficient.

 

[ArchGhost]

^^
Yep do this all the time, very helpful.

If you want to add the same buildings to all your cities in this way, it can help to create this queue in a newer city or one with more infrastructure left to complete. Make it there, hot key it, then Ctrl or Alt-click a nameplate to select all and apply the queue to all cities. Whichever buildings are already in place (or can't be completed without a prereq, like a Coal Plant or Supermarket) in other cities are skipped automatically, but everything else gets queued up in the proper order. If a city already has everything in the queue, it empties the queue for that city entirely.

Infinite builds are only copied as a single build in hotkeyed lists, so heads up if you want every city to build a little infrastructure then crank units -- you'll have to manually append another infinite build order to the end of the list (which can be done by selecting all, easy).

Shouldn't have to empty the queues (by building Wealth/etc. with build automation on for a turn) as the hotkeyed queue overwrites everything else.

Also note that when selecting multiple cities, the build options displayed are for the oldest city in the group by founding order (so your cap first). Hence why you want to create queues in newer cities, or cities that CAN build the structure/unit in question (start in a coastal city for a lighthouse, or one with access to horses for Cuirs if you want to queue up those things everywhere else they can be built) then copy them elsewhere.

You can also use the city management tools in BUG to sort through your cities and only select the ones that need what you want, if you don't want to disturb particular cities. In fact I can always recommend the city management tool in BUG, it's really handy for many things, helps most when you have a lot of cities, and allows you manage an entire empire with a quick glance at the tables to triage and parse through cities based on what you're doing (such as whipping 2 pops as they come up). I rely on it a lot when clicking on nameplates becomes more difficult later in the game with more units cluttering things.

 

[Pangaea]

Good advice. Personally I don't use the F1 city overview list for empire management (I go through all cities each turn), but more for the overview it brings. Sort cities according to the next GP, what they're all producing, stuff like that. It's very useful. You can also edit them to your heart's content. You can make entirely new pages as well, but after reinstalling the game I simply edited the main page instead. Easier. Oh, and you can also change the BUG settings so that some of the main game buttons are viewable. I prefer that, so have done it here. An example:

Spoiler :

Previously I've put base beakers and hammers and such in there, but it's only of marginal importance and makes it even more cluttered, so have kept it somewhat simpler this time.

As you can imagine, the city screen and suchlike in Civ 5 left a LOT to be desired....

 

[pomthom]

Very useful stuff guys

 

[ArchGhost]

Not about troop management, but another little Today I Learned kinda thing:

Looking through the XMLs, you can see that vassals break from master based on their own war losses, and have a weight of 0 set for the master's losses....so in useful terms, if you want to break up a master/vassal pair, beat up the little guy.