speeding up the game

[Thoth]

Originally posted by Ironikinit
In my last game I ended up automating all my workers with Shift A. Worked fine, even though they still take too long to all move, there's like 50 of them. I had a little under 30 cities.

In the Preferences menu (post patch) there is are options to control what unit moves you see. You can toggle enemy, friend and your own automated units on or off. I find playing with friendly and automated units not showing signifcantly reduces wait time (it also stops the annoying screen jumping as 50 automated workers move around your empire).

[Dimension]

Originally posted by Willem
16 civs takes WAY to long on my lowly 400mhz Celeron. By the endgame, I can see a turn lasting an hour or two.

My roommate has a 400 MHz Celeron, and he's currently playing a 16-civ game on a huge map. He's been playing on and off for the past week, and reading a book between turns... but it only takes about a minute, and he's in the late 1700's with 85,000 culture, so it shouldn't last much longer. He upgraded to 640MB RAM, though (in Oct when you could get 256 delivered for $20), so I'm sure that helps.

[Rosacrux]

Faster AI turns

The only thing that can significantly speed up this $##^%@ game on huge (and even large) maps is a new set of algorithms for the AI turns. They take AGES.

One minute or so? Rubish! On my PIII 900 (256 RAM, but I don't think that's too crucial on game performance) I had a game on a huge (really huge - 256X256) map, with 16 civs, and by the 1500's (and while being pretty close to the end of the tech tree) it took up to 20 minutes for the AI to take one turn!!!

I just had to quit this game, it was tottaly unplayable. I had started it off as a scenario though, with it's own modified rules, so I am able to dig in from time to time and play a turn here and there.

Now I stick to large maps (homemade, actually, to increase the land percentage - my maps have about 70-80% land mass coverage, and it allows for bigger empires) with 8 civs. And it's still kinda slow...

[barefootbadass]

Re: Faster AI turns

Originally posted by Rosacrux
The only thing that can significantly speed up this $##^%@ game on huge (and even large) maps is a new set of algorithms for the AI turns. They take AGES.

Have you personally seen the algorithms they use to make the ai move, and thereby know that they are inefficient? Or are you just assuming that they are because turns take so long? The processing that must be done in this game is much more complicated, particularly with the ai and trade networks, than anything of civ2. At any rate the main thing that sucks time for me(I've only done large with 12 civs) is my own playing of the turns, although I am getting more efficient, would be nice if the ai could have been programmed to generate more efficient algorthims for itself as the game went on wouldn't it?

If you are playing huge an large maps you should know that firaxis only officially recommends using up to 8, presumably for this very problem you are complaining about.

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by barefootbadass
What really annoys me is when the governors of the cities don't do what I tell them to do. I usually default my cities to wealth every turn(by setting everything else to 'never') and manual decide what to build and queue up. But the governers seem to decide to switch to workers sometimes anyway(that's all they switch to) and then I have to change them back to wealth or something else. It doesn't take long to change production orders, but it does get old sometimes.

If you want a city to produce wealth indefinetly, just uncheck the "Manage Production" box in the governor window for that city. If you do that, the city will never switch our of "Wealth".

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by Willem

Also I'd like to see something that allowed me to just keep making the same thing over and over again, like a production loop. If I have a town with Barracks for instance, it would be nice if I could tell it to build Horsemen until the end of time, and only Horsemen. That way I wouldn't have to keep going back to it to tell the Governor what to do.

If you have the "Manage Production" flag turned off for the city and you have the "Always Start Building Previously Built Unit" preference turned on, then the city will go into a production loop whenever you start building a unit. Thus, if you have the city build a Horsemen unit, the city will continue building Horsemen units until you tell it differently.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis


If you have the "Manage Production" flag turned off for the city and you have the "Always Start Building Previously Built Unit" preference turned on, then the city will go into a production loop whenever you start building a unit. Thus, if you have the city build a Horsemen unit, the city will continue building Horsemen units until you tell it differently.

But then the Domestic Advisor keeps popping up, or at least she did when I tried to use that function. Anyway, it's a minor thing for me, I've learned to manage my production queues fairly well by now.

[Aeson]

On Pollution Cleanup -

This is by far the single most intensive micromanagement part of the end game. First, if governors aren't managing population, the worker assigned to the polluted square doesn't go back to work after the pollution is cleaned up, I would much rather have the worker continue to work the polluted square than to have to manually reset them. Turning on the governors isn't something that I like doing, but have to later in the game for this reason.

Also, having only 2 workers go to each square of pollution adds a lot of micromanagement as well. Often these are captured workers that take up to 12 turns to clean up a spot of pollution (on mountains) in a pair. With pollution as likely as it is, this means that often 3-4 tiles in each metropolis' radius will be constantly polluted even with the 2 workers per pollution tile. Because of this I manually select workers and place them on pollution tiles, sometimes doing this takes 10-15 minutes per turn for larger empires. If shift-p would just put all workers to pollution cleanup until all pollution was cleaned up that turn, that would cut out so much of the tedium and boredom of the late game. If workers would remember that they were on pollution cleanup duty the next turn, at least until they saw there wasn't any more pollution to clean up, that would be great.

[Soren Johnson]

Originally posted by Aeson
On Pollution Cleanup -

This is by far the single most intensive micromanagement part of the end game. First, if governors aren't managing population, the worker assigned to the polluted square doesn't go back to work after the pollution is cleaned up, I would much rather have the worker continue to work the polluted square than to have to manually reset them. Turning on the governors isn't something that I like doing, but have to later in the game for this reason.

Also, having only 2 workers go to each square of pollution adds a lot of micromanagement as well. Often these are captured workers that take up to 12 turns to clean up a spot of pollution (on mountains) in a pair. With pollution as likely as it is, this means that often 3-4 tiles in each metropolis' radius will be constantly polluted even with the 2 workers per pollution tile. Because of this I manually select workers and place them on pollution tiles, sometimes doing this takes 10-15 minutes per turn for larger empires. If shift-p would just put all workers to pollution cleanup until all pollution was cleaned up that turn, that would cut out so much of the tedium and boredom of the late game. If workers would remember that they were on pollution cleanup duty the next turn, at least until they saw there wasn't any more pollution to clean up, that would be great.

have you tried "shift+A"? This will automate the units but will not change previous terraforms. In other words, the workers will not chop down forests or change mines to irrigation and vice-versa. They will, however, clean-up pollution and will sleep whenver there is nothing to do so you don't have to deal with them again.

[Aeson]

I have tried using Shift-A. The problem is they still don't stack more than 2 per pollution tile. Also if there is any other job still to be done, they seem to do that before cleaning up pollution. This is probably why the AI's territory is often covered in pollution.

Is there any way that an automation preferences menu can be added to the game? Like what was included in SMAC. Options could be something like Emphasize/Allow/Disallow: Irrigation, Mining, Roads/Railroads, Clearing Pollution, Clearing Forest, Clearing Jungle. Very much like what the Governors menu is like. Also making it so that more than 2 workers would stack per automated job would really help. Maybe an option to set the minimum job time, so it would add workers until that objective was set. I realize this could mean a large change in code, but even just the option for number of workers per job for pollution would be wonderful.

The main problem I have with governors managing population is that they always change specialists to what I dont want them to be. If my Science rate is 100%, all the specialists become taxmen or entertainers. If my science rate is 0%, they all become scientists. In a recent game I spent over an hour setting 250+ cities' specialists in the most efficient manner for one turn. Then I hit enter, and the governors changed them all back to the scientists I didn't want. Adding an option to be able to chose what specialists default to would be perfect. At least to have governors not change specialists at all, so I could do it manually once, instead of manually every turn.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Aeson

Is there any way that an automation preferences menu can be added to the game? Like what was included in SMAC. Options could be something like Emphasize/Allow/Disallow: Irrigation, Mining, Roads/Railroads, Clearing Pollution, Clearing Forest, Clearing Jungle. Very much like what the Governors menu is like. Also making it so that more than 2 workers would stack per automated job would really help. Maybe an option to set the minimum job time, so it would add workers until that objective was set. I realize this could mean a large change in code, but even just the option for number of workers per job for pollution would be wonderful.

That would be very nice indeed. I'd like to be able to specialise my workers a lot more, especially when it comes to irrigation. I'd love to have a few who do nothing but irrigate, regardless of whether they do a good job or not. You can't really go wrong with this type of improvement, sooner or later it will have be to be done.

Another thing that would be good is the automated worker being able to differentiate between raw forest, and those that have been purposefully planted. Maybe have a different Forest type, like a tree farm that it wouldn't touch. It's frustrating to see one chop down a forest that I had just finished planting for the extra shields. If it weren't for that, I'd use the automation a lot more than I do.

[nap2]

I think we could all agree that the automation options need to be slightly improved (250 cities.....yikes! That musta sucked).

I'm a war-monger for the most part, so once I start rockin, I don't want to have to worry about pollution and stupid stuff, let the automation take care of this, so I strongly agree.

Did anyone find a way to email suggestions to firaxis?? I checked the web site, but I didn't see anything offhand. If anyone knows how, please do suggest these automation improvements to the company, they'd probably appreciate it, whether it may or may not be possible, it's worth a shot.

Otherwise, we're doomed to unending tedium....

[Willem]

Originally posted by nap2
I think we could all agree that the automation options need to be slightly improved (250 cities.....yikes! That musta sucked).

I'm a war-monger for the most part, so once I start rockin, I don't want to have to worry about pollution and stupid stuff, let the automation take care of this, so I strongly agree.

Did anyone find a way to email suggestions to firaxis?? I checked the web site, but I didn't see anything offhand. If anyone knows how, please do suggest these automation improvements to the company, they'd probably appreciate it, whether it may or may not be possible, it's worth a shot.

Otherwise, we're doomed to unending tedium....

Look for a link called "Ask the Civ Team". You have to look around, it's not blatantly obvious.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis


If you want a city to produce wealth indefinetly, just uncheck the "Manage Production" box in the governor window for that city. If you do that, the city will never switch our of "Wealth".

Oh! thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!

That will save me so much time.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis


If you want a city to produce wealth indefinetly, just uncheck the "Manage Production" box in the governor window for that city. If you do that, the city will never switch our of "Wealth".

Sorry, but not true. I have my Governor set for No on production managing, and Never on everything besides Wealth, which is Often. And I still get the occasional time when it tries to produce something else, usually the last unit made by any of my cities. Not very often, but it does happen.