getting the most of your time

[defrancoj]

Hi all:

I was hoping someone could talk about ways of getting the most out of your playing time without (obviously) sacrificing playing well. With so much of my life going toward remembering where caravans and settlers are headed and where i want to rush-buy stuff to get the most for my gold, any tips on economizing on time will surely be useful.

[Scouse Gits]

Although the goto command is somewhat buggy and can go horribly wrong in the neighbourhood of the prime meridian it does become useful in the middle to late game when many units are on the move...

Stu

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

I play gigamaps a lot - and that inevitably leads to moments of disorientation when the command prompt switches to a unit that's off in the middle of nowhere. It also leads to micromanagement issues, obviously. Some of my ideas:

Rename your cities to make them more descriptive. If you have 3 Cunaxas, this can be absolutely crucial. For example, I rename cities with an airport "Cunaxa - a" so I can easily find them for unit airlift purposes. (The fact that a city has an airport is shown on the goto menu, but it isn't obvious on the map screen).

If I have a main continent with one shipping point (where my shipchain originates), I'll rename the port city "AAA- Cunaxa - a" - showing it has an airport. The AAA prefix just puts it at the top of the city list on the goto menu - saves some scrolling. If your continent has goto issues due to size, you may need to do your goto-ing in stages. The waystation cities would be AAB -Ghent, AAC- Melbourne, and so on. Again, it saves scrolling. In most cases, I'll just bite the bullet and railroad all the terrain where goto commands start to get confused.

You can add additional suffixes - I sometimes use "H" for superhighways.

Cities with an SDI have the suffix "s". Cities that are staging points vs various AIs have the AI Civ's initial as a suffix.

So, Cunaxa with an airport and SDI near the Indians would be "Cunaxa - a, s, i"

Rushbuying - all white goods get rushed, once a turn's worth of shields is in the box. That simplifies some of the decision making process. I generally remember which cities to rush Freights in, but if I don't, the cities with a "H" usually get rushed up to Diplomat or Rifleman (as required) and then switched back to Freight.

Generally, at the end of each turn, I go through the city status screen and look to see where I can spend excess cash, and do my rushing then.

Hope that helps.

[rjmatsleepers]

Well, playing an OCC reduces the amount of micro-management. And on a good day, an OCC will significantly reduce my confusion about city names.

RJM at Sleeper's