Auto-Buying

[loinburger]

I never really had this problem in Civ (no queue, slow expansion) or Civ II (didn't play it all that much), but in Masters of Orion II (which is, after all, just Civ in Space) dragged in the middle-game. My strategy was: play a tech race, make peace with everybody, max out in tech, colonize like crazy, build up each colonized planet into a powerhouse, and utterly crush my stone age, underpopulated, industrially backwards opponents. Middle-game was when I had more or less maxed out my production technologies (I was able to build nearly every building, although I was often behind in military technology). I would build fifty colony ships (settlers) and colonize a whole slew of planets across the galaxy.

That was when the micro-managing nightmare began. I had already worked out the best build order, and would queue up as many buildings as I could on all of my newly colonized planets. Unfortunately, planetary growth was always incredibly slow in the first few years, before my automated factories and deep core mines had been built, along with five or six other production-related buildings. I would also never feel safe until my laser and missile batteries were up. My economy was booming on the planets that I had previously colonized and built up, so money was no object (especially with two or three alien races paying tribute to supplement my income); as a result I would buy the first eight to twelve buildings queued up on every newly colonized planet. For the next twenty turns, as my colony ships made their way across the galaxy, I would find myself clicking on fifty different planets to buy the next building in queue. My turns began to last a half hour each, sometimes as long as 2 hours, as I micromanaged the snot out of my empire.

A similar problem was encountered the few times that I played Civ II. I would see an enemy army coming my way and would queue up three or four tanks, mechanized infantries, and howies in ten or fifteen of my more built up cities. My turns would then take an hour as I went around buying all of my tanks, howies, and infantrymen every turn. Again, a micromanagement nightmare.

It seems like it would be a relatively simple task to allow a unit on the queue to be auto-bought, so long as funds were available. The programming is already there to queue up a bunch of units, so it should take about a bit of information to say "auto-buy" or "do not auto-buy," and maybe a few lines of code to check that bit.

A more complicated option would be to allow a unit to be auto-bought when its price dropped below a critical value, and/or when it reached a certain percent completion. Unit prices decrease rapidly with only a few shields put into them, and if I were in a mild hurry to get my tanks I would say "buy the tank when it is 10% complete" and save a bundle of money. This adds a lot more code and is probably unnecessary, but hey, it never hurts to bring the idea up.

Anybody here ever have similar qualms with the game? Or am I alone with my "build fifty cities at once" tactic?

[Urban Ranger]

The main problem isn't with you are unable to buy certain items automatically, it's with the interface. If there is some sort of centralised area where you can access all the build queues at onece (I think Space Empire IV has this feature) then you don't have to hop all over the map looking at the cities.

I believe hopping all over the place is where you waste your time.

[airdrik]

Maybe, in the city status screen (The one in the menu which has all the cities and what they are building) It would have by each of their production orders the Buy-it button, so you could just go throught that, ,,,... And you've baught all your stuff.

Another idea: In the Attitude screen, with all the cities' citizens, you can change the extras between entertainers/scientists/taxmen (or whatever they have that you can just cycle through) right there.

[Cannes]

Ctp has a great city screen. You can load in build qeues and rush buy from there...

[eNo]

I do something similar in SMAC but then there's a Bases display to help things along so I can access the cities pretty easily. As long as there's something similar in CivIII I'll be satisfied. I'm not sure how auto-buy could be implemented either.