Civ 4 is a slow game and matches can take several hours, even reaching the double digits. In the late game, having dozens of cities and hundreds of units to manage every turn can be overwhelming.

Luckily, the game offers a lot of features to ease up your empire management. Your games don’t have to become a slog.

These features will not necessarily make you better at the game, but at least can help you play a little faster, minimizing your time spent on trivial stuff and letting you focus on the actual decision making.

You already know about building stuff in a city. You use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to select buildings or units to build in your city of choice.

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Once your building finishes, the game will ask you to select other stuff to build. This is mandatory, as your cities can’t stand idle.



This prompts you to select a new thing to build. This can get tedious when you have multiple cities.

To avoid the constant interruptions, you can instruct a city to build stuff on a sequence by holding Shift and then clicking on the stuff that you want to build. The queue will appear at the bottom left corner of the screen. Any stuff that you Shift-click will appear at the bottom of the queue.

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The city will build stuff from the queue from top to bottom. As soon as it finishes with its current build, it will move on to the next without asking you.

You can remove stuff from the queue by simply left clicking the item you wish to remove.

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Shift-clicking adds stuff to the bottom of the queue. If you want to add stuff to the top, then use Ctrl-clicking instead. This is useful if you want to build something that has more priority, but you still want to build the rest of your stuff afterwards.

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Things get interesting when it comes to units. You can add multiple units to the queue either by Shift-clicking or Ctrl-clicking.

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Let’s say you are preparing for war and need a lot of units. Shift-clicking a hundred times in each city can be tedious. What you can do instead is order your city to build your unit indefinitely by holding Alt and clicking on the unit icon. The unit will appear in the queue with an asterisk next to its name:

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You can even have multiple units built indefinitely in your queue. Use Alt+Shift or Alt+Ctrl if you want to add the unit at the bottom or at the top of the queue, respectively.

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The city in the image above will make a maceman and then a catapult, then another maceman and then a catapult again, and so on until you manually remove them from the queue. This is really useful for massing units in the late game.

Ideally, you want to always have stuff in the queues of all your cities to minimize the pop-up interruptions as much as possible.

Just like with city production, if you finish to research a techology, a pop-up will appear asking you to select a new techology to research.



If you’re on the tech tree screen, you can select a sequence of techs to research by holding Shift and clicking on each tech in the order you want. The game will research the first technology and then move on to the next one without asking you.

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You can tell the order of the techologies to research by the number shown at the left side of the technology name.



Selecting a techology will also select all its pre-requisites. Useful if you want to beeline to an specific tech.

To restore the queue, simply click on the techology you want to currently research without holding Shift and the game will forget the queue and just focus on the tech you just clicked.

Ideally you want to queue the next techology you want to research before the game finishes with the current one. This way you’ll barely get pop-ups during your playthrough. Plan ahead.

You already know that double clicking a city will show you the city management screen:

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However, if you single click (not double click) a city bar, you will select that city without going to the city management screen. The city bar will be highlighted with a flashing white border, and most importantly, the buttons to build units and buildings will show up at the bottom of the screen along with the build queue.

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This by itself doesn’t offer anything particularily useful that you couldn’t simply do with good old double clicking. However, single-clicking allows you to select more than one city at the same time.

To select more than one city, hold Shift and single-click the city bar of the cities you want to select. Your selected cities will be highlighted.

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You can also quick select all the cities you own. To do this, hold Alt and then single-click any city bar. All your cities will be selected.

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Similarily, you can hold Ctrl and then single-click a city bar to select all cities on that continent.

Click anywhere on the map to deselect the cities and go back to normal play.

Regardess of which method of selection you use, the useful thing about selecting multiple cities is that you can manipulate the build queues of all your selected cities at the same time. Let's assume you just discovered Assembly Line and want to build factories in all your cities: Alt-click a city bar to select all your cities and then Ctrl-click the factory button; a factory will be added at the top of the queue of every city. Fast and easy.

Pressing F1, or clicking on the first button on the top-right corner of the screen, will show up the city list screen:

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This screen shows useful data about your cities and you can even sort them by clicking on the corresponding column button. This is useful to find your most productive cities, the ones producing more commerce or the ones struggling with happiness, and so on.


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You can select a city by left clicking on its respective row or even select multiple cities by Ctrl clicking. The rows will be highlighted.

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Just like with city bar selection, you can add build orders to your cities using the build buttons at the bottom of the screen.



Let’s say you’re preparing for war and want to build some siege. You can press F1 to open up the city list, click on the hammer column to order your cities by production, Ctrl-select your most productive cities and then Ctrl-click the artillery button a couple of times to add them at the top of each city queue. Your selected cities will start to mass artillery, and it only took you a couple of clicks.

You can have hundreds of units by reaching the endgame, and giving orders to them one by one can be overwhelming.

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Luckly, the game provides options to select multiple units at the same time, as long as they are on the same tile.

To select all units in your stack, hold Alt and then either click on any unit icon at the bottom of the screen or click on the tile where your units are placed. The unit icons of your selected units will appear with a yellow border.

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Single click any unit to deselect your stack and just select the unit you just clicked.

To add or remove units in your selection, hold Shift and then click on any unit icon you want to add or remove.

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To select all units of a same type, hold Ctrl and press on the unit icon that you want to select. This is useful to quickly select your siege to do collateral damage against an enemy stack, or to select an specific type that counters an enemy, and so on.

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You can combine Shift+Ctrl to add all units of a type to the current selection.

To select all your wounded units, press Ctrl+H. This is useful to quickly make them heal or even retreat.

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There’s no hotkey to select healthy units. What you can do instead is select all your stack, then select all your wounded units and then press Space to make them pass the turn. This will deselect your wounded units and select the rest of the stack.

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Regardless of which method you use to make your selection, you can give orders to your units as a group. Press F to make them all fortify; press H to make them all heal; press Space to make them all skip a turn; right click to move them all to a tile, etc. The only exception is attacking: if you right click on an enemy stack with several units selected, only one of them will attack, so you have to right click several times to attack with all of them.

Normally, any unit you build in a city will appear on that city tile and wait for you to give it orders. This can be tedious when you are massing an army.

Just like in some RTS games, you can set rally points. To do this, select a city by single-clicking a city bar, and then hold Shift and right click the tile where you can your units to go. The destination will be marked with a yellow circle.

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Any new unit made in this city will automatically go to the destination as soon as it is created. This includes non-military units like workers and settlers, so be careful.

You can even set rally points of multiple cities selected at the same time.

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To remove a rally point, simply set a new rally point on the city itself by holding Shift and right clicking on the city tile. This will make the yellow circle dissappear and your new units will behave as normal. This also works with multiple cities; just set a rally point to any of your selected cities and all your cities will remove their rally point.

Rally points are really handy if you are massing units and want them to move to a tile next to your neighbor territory, or want to send reinforcements to a city that is under siege, and so on. You shouldn’t move your massively created units individually.

They are especially useful if you want to prepare for an overseas invasion. You can have a group of coastal cities making transports with a rally point set on a coastal tile, while having a different group of cities producing ground units with a rally point set on a ground tile next to the coastal one. Press F to order any unit that arrives to its destination to sleep. Once you are ready, just select your whole ground army by Alt-clicking and then simply move the whole stack to the transports. All your units will embark in a single move.

You probably know that you can activate the resouce icons by pressing Ctrl+R or by clicking the corresponding button at the top of the minimap. This will show an icon over every resource.

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By default, the game will show icons over every type of resource. However, if you zoom the camera out until you reach globe view, you will see filtering options at the bottom right of the screen:


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You can filter either food, luxuries or strategic resources by using the filter list. This way you can quickly glance at the map from afar to see if you or your neighbours have access to an specific type of resource, say, coal or aluminum in the late game.

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Similarily, if you press Alt+U or press the first button at the top of the minimap, you will activate the enemy unit icons, which will show an icon over units of civilizations you are at war with, and again, zooming out will show you the filtering options. By default, the game will show you only the enemy units that are inside your territory, which may or may not be useful to you in your current situation, but you can select a more appropriate filter if you like.


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The important thing to keep in mind is that any filter you apply to either the resource or the unit icons will stay applied even after you zoom back in.

If you are at peace, I recommend to leave the resource icons on, and filter them if you want to quickly find an specific type of resource and then inmediately disable that filter. If you are at war, I recommend using the enemy icons with the "Enemy Military" filter, and keep it activated during the whole war. It will show an icon for every enemy unit either inside or outside your territory, even if they are out of your camera, so you don't have to glance at your whole territory after every turn to check for sneak attacks.

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Many thanks to jleeming for letting me know about filtering by resource. I honestly had no idea :)

You may have noticed that the screenshots above have the camera shifted to an angle. To do this, hold Ctrl and then press either the left or the right arrow key to rotate the camera 45 degrees.

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Personally I prefer to play with the the camera rotated to the left. It makes the game look less “squarish”, more similar to isometric games like Civ 3 or Age of Empires.

This has nothing to do with speed. I just think it looks nice.

• Probably the most time consuming thing in the game are the animations. If you are new to the game, I highly recommend to just disable the movement and combat animations of your units.
  
  
• In the settings menu, there’s an option called “minimize pop-ups”. Like the name says, this will stop the pop-ups from appearing at the beginning of your turn, and instead will make them appear at the end of your turn, after issuing orders to all your units. I highly recommend activating this option.
  
  
• In the early game, manual worker management is a must; automatic workers tend to do sub-optimal tile improvements. However, in the late game, where most of your land is already developed, I recommend just automating your workers. In the settings menu, make sure to enable the options “Automated workers leave improvements” and “Automated workers leave forests” so that your automated workers don’t replace your existing improvements and just focus on working on unimproved tiles, make repairs and build roads and railroads.
  
  
• Press the Spacebar to finish your turn. It’s faster than manually clicking on the red circle on screen, and in my opinion is more confortable than pressing Enter.
  
  
• Install the BUG mod to add more information to the interface. Highly customisable, so you can disable the features you don't like. Personally I can't play without it.

Making use of the features mentioned in the guide can take some time and practice, but hopefully will make your future games a little quicker.

The purpose behind this guide is not to teach you to rush your game. On the contrary, you should take your sweet time thinking about strategies and tactics, because that’s where the game is at its best. The purpose of the guide is to help you minimize the busywork; you shouldn’t be spending hours just moving units around the map and giving instructions to your cities one by one.

Hopefully after mastering these features, your matches take so little time that you can play twice as many games :)