Phiphi's Speedy Guide to Playing Civ V Fast

This guide aims to inform you about how to play the game faster, giving you an edge over your slower opponents!

Introduction

In this guide I aim to improve how you play your Civ V matches so that you can assess information and issue orders to units significantly faster. This will help you to manage your empire effectively whilst giving your units the edge in multiplayer matches.

Whilst a lot of the information in this guide will be known by intermediate-level players and above, there is still hopefully some nuggets of wisdom to be gleaned from the guide. For players new to the game this will hopefully offer some new concepts and tools that you can use to be more sucessful in your endeavours!.

Queueing & Game Settings

Queueing

Advanced readers will probably want to skip ahead to Game Options.

Creating a production queue in your city simply means that you set up a list of things that you want to be built and the city will then crunch through each project and move on to the next automatically without you having to select a new task between builds. This is nice and handy as it means that you don't spend more time than is necessary selecting city projects instead of focussing on more important things in your empire.

I want to walk through how to do this step-by-step for new players reading this guide, as I didn't know you could do this for quite a while and it is a very handy thing to know.


Open up your City Window by clicking on your city's name. Select the "Show Queue" tick box


From here click on "Add to Queue"


Select your units, buildings and wonders to be built from the menu on the left and let your city make its own way through the list

Game Options Explained

From the Main Menu that is available when the game loads, we can go through the Options Tab where we arrive at the Game Options Menu.


My settings in the Game Options tab. Try them out and see if they suit you

Feature	Effect
Automated Workers Don't Replace Improvements	Automated Workers don't replace existing improvements
Automated Workers Don't Remove Features	Automated Workers don't remove features, like Forests, Jungle or Marshes, except when improving a Strategic or Luxury Resource
No Reward Pop-ups	Disables reward pop-ups (Technology, Ancient Ruins, etc.)
No Tile Recommendations	Disables on-map recommendations when Settlers or Workers are selected
Display Yields for Civilian Units	Displays on-map yield information when civilian units are selected
No Basic Tooltip Help	Condenses many game tooltips to just the raw information, removing explanatory help
Quick Selection Advance	The unit selection will advance to the next unit as soon as a command is given and will not wait for animations to complete

Enabling the first Worker-related option whilst disabling the second option means that your Workers won't replace important improvements which you likely instructed your Workers to complete in the early game (before you built a few and you set them to Auto mode), whilst simultaneously allowing them to create the right new improvements by removing forests etc. on useful tiles. Quick Selection Advance is a must to accerlate the pace of the game - otherwise wait until you get aeroplanes and each turn can take 5 minutes with animations! The remaining options are down to personal preference.

Having Quick Movement and Quick Combat enabled skips the animations associated with the two actions and will make for a faster game all-round, providing no inherent advantage to you specifically other than making the game itself a bit faster.
The advisor level should be set to a level appropriate to your own experience.

Interface Options Explained

The few selections on the Interface Options screen have a surprisingly big effect on your in-game experience.


These are my Interface Settings, which are optimised to how I like to play the game. I need to change the Auto Unit Cycle option!

Feature	Effect
Alternate Cursor Zoom Mode	When zooming out, the camera will pull straight back instead of remaining achored to the cursor
Show All Policy Inforamtion	All policies will be displayed in the social policy screen, regardless of era and what branches have been unlocked
Auto Unit Cycle	Automatically select the next unit after orders are issued

The Alternate Cursor Zoom Mode is purely a personal preference and you will have to try it out for yourself in order to decide whether you want it enabled or not.
The extra information shown in the policy trees when Show All Policy Information is enabled makes the social policy screen look less pretty but a lot more practical. I like having this enabled as it helps me to remind myself of what each policy does and helps me to have a plan when unlocking the policies in a tree, speeding up my desicion-making process.

Having the Auto Unit Cycle turned off can be very annoying and even dangerous during wars in your games, as you may find (as I often do!) that you get switched to low-priority units, such as Workers or Missionaries, instead of the key military units that you want to select first at the start of the turn. This can mean that your units don't get the crucial first attack and can be the difference between loosing or keeping a city to an enemy, betwen having your Great General build a Citadel or being captured by a hostile Horseman or having your Settler found a city in the perfect location or it being captured by barbs. If you decide, therefore, to turn it off, then it's worth knowing that you can cycle through units using the "." (full-stop) and "," (comma) keys on your keyboard respectively to move quickly through your units. Having it on can be nice and takes a lot of the work out of unit selection, so if you anticipate a nice, easy game or you are not yourself an agressive player, you will get away with having this enabled without too many negative consequences.

Quickly Accessible Overviews, Part I:

This section looks at how to open up the Overview Tabs quickly and get as much information out of them as possible.

The Overview Tabs are fantastic ways of collecting all of the information about a certain aspect of the game on one screen. They allow you to keep tabs on what is going on in your cities, manage your armies and monitor progress in the wider world - all of which will prevent nasty surprises from occuring later on by informing you what's really happening before it has even happened!

Overview	Key
Civilopedia Homepage	f1
Economic	f2
Military	f3
Diplomacy	f4
Social Policies	f5
Tech tree	f6
Notification Log	f7
Victory Progress	f8
Demographics	f9
Strategic View	f10

Civilopedia Homepage

Pressing f1 will bring up the Civilopedia Homepage. For anyone who doesn't know, this is essentially an in-game encyclopedia (Civilisation + Encyclopedia = Civilopedia. Makes sense right?) which contains information on everything within the game. It sometimes is a bit basic in terms of the information given but can be really useful for looking up the special traits of other players and their units, as no one is able to remember them all!

Economic Overview

I never realised how much information this overview actually contained until I started writing this guide (!) so hopefully I can pass on some knowledge to you as to how to use this tab if you don't use it much already.
In the General Information section, you are presented with a list of your cities with associated information including; the current population, turns until the next citizen is generated, gold/science/culture/faith/production output per turn, city strength, what is being built there and the time it will take for it to be completed. This alone is enough reason to visit this overview screen as it allows you to very quickly see which cities are behind in certain areas and what needs to be built there to compensate - in the screenshot below you can see that Hastings is very far behind in science output so chosing to build a University there will help to rectify that issue.
Your empire's gold income and expenses are also shown on the left, with breakdowns showing you money lost through road maintenance, unit and building maintenance and any gold costs associated with diplomatic trades.

In the Resources and Happiness section, the Happiness of your empire can be broken down to see how much happiness is generated by luxury resources, by "local happiness" modifiers i.e happiness buildings built within a city (Colusseums, Zoos, Stadiums) and by "global happiness" modifiers i.e happiness gained through wonders like Notre Dame and the Circus Maximus, which is useful as it can show you areas for improvement if you are struggling with your Happiness.
Your Unhappiness can also be viewed here, and can be seen to be related to the number of cities that you have and the total number of citizens (your total population) within your empire. The Resources Available section simply shows you what is in your hotbar (normally found at the top of the screen) but also tells you how much of each resource is imported or exported.

Military Overview

This tab is great for when you have a big army and need to move it around, upgrade it or manage unit maintenance costs quickly. From here you can view every unit that is under your control, including civilian units, and select them easily, allowing you to rapidly upgrade an army upon discovering a new tech or move a group of units to a certain location on the map with minimal hastle. It also lets you see if you have an excess of one unit (I'm guilty of over-producing Workers) and keep track of Great General/ Admiral progress.

Diplomacy Overview

This tab contains lots of useful information! From here you can see the luxury and strategic resources that other players own, their current gold and their gold per turn income, which allows you to set up desirable trades with other players. The Deal History lets you see which deals you have on the table with other players and how long they have left, and is useful for checking Open Borders and Peace Treaty expiration dates.

The Global Politics section is also super-helpful. Firstly, it shows you which policies other players have adopted, giving you an indication of their playstyle and also an understanding of which wonders they are capable of building - this proves to be very useful when you're trying to determine whether you have any competition for policy-specific wonders e.g. Big Ben requires Commerce, Hanging Gardens requires Traditon etc. Secondly, this section shows you which wonders have already been built by that civilisation. If there is a key wonder that you missed out on then you can look here, determine which civ has the wonder and from there use spies planted in enemy cities to find out where the wonder was built, potentially setting you up to take the city by force in order to secure the wonder. Wonders built can help you to predict how a player will behave later in the game, for example, the Stature of Zeus + Notre Dame + Brandenburg gate suggests a domination-orientated playstyle, whilst Hanging Gardens + Petra could mean someone will have a high-pop, tall city layout and may turtle up.

Social Policies

This tab is useful for reviewing the policies that you have already adopted and trying to figure out what you will go for next. Note that you can see how many turns it will be until you can unlock your next policy at the bottom of the screen and also that the era in which certain policy trees become available is shown at the top of each policy tree. This gives you some flexibility in trying to match the turns until a new policy with your research that will lead you to a new era and hence a higher-tier policy tree.

Quickly Accessible Overviews, Part II:

Tech tree

Pressing f6 opens up the tech tree, which shows you the technologies that you already have, the one that you are currently researching and your future research path.
If you hold the Shift key whilst selecting technologies to research, then the technologies will be queued in a similar way to when making a production queue in a city, which will prevent you from having to pick technologies too frequently. Shift-clicking will also make it easier to bee-line techs as it will select the fastest route to a technology that has multiple pre-requisite technologies which are needed first. Paying attention to the wonders and units that other people have built will give you an indication of where they are on the tech tree.

Notification Log

If you think that you might have missed an important notification in the previous turn (e.g the winner of International Games) then you can check the notification log to see what occured in previous turns. Not mind-blowingly helpful, but nice to have none the less.

Victory Progress

The only real use that I have found for this tab in the early game is that it can be used to see which civs you are up against in a multiplayer game (if everyone chose the random leader option and you didn't know already who they were) even if you haven't actually met them yet. I think this is kinda cheaty but what can you do about it? In the later game it's useful for keeping track of domination and space victory routes.

Demographics

The demographics tab is a fantastic tool for comparing how you are faring compared to others in the game. It gives you stats for your civ to compare to the best, worst and avergae scores across a range of categories and is super-useful for picking out big threats and weak targets. It is a more concrete indication of how well a player is doing than their overall score.
As a tip, if you're a fan of rushing the Great Library in the early game then you can check the demographics tab and see if anyone else has discovered the Writing technology before/ at the same time as you. When you unlock Writing you can start building the Great Library, but also your Literacy score in the demographics menu becomes non-zero. Hence, if the average Literacy value is shown to be non-zero in the demographics tab then other players also have the Writing technology and could be in competition to build the wonder.

Strategic Overview

Whilst I don't personally use this option, pressing f10 will switch the map from the normal to the strategic view. This condenses the information shown on the map and allows you to quickly asses where important resources and units are and is supposed to make it easier to see through all the gubbins that is shown on the traditional map. I, however, prefer to see the map in all it's beauty, but it's definitely worth giving this a try and seeing whether it benefits your playstyle or not.

Useful Keybinds

Key binds can speed up your gameplay significantly and can make that all-important difference in sticky situations with enemies. Below I have listed all of the important keybinds associated with the Military and Civilian classes of units - I would advise that it might be easier to just refer to this guide than to try and remember each one, but if you can remember them individually then you will have an extra string on your Civ bow. I have about 10 important ones that I try to use, which I will also share with you below.

I also found a great "infographic" for the hotkeys by NominalAeon on redit for you to enjoy!

Hotkey Inforgraphic[rodenbeek.com]

Top 10 Keybinds

Hotkey	Action
Enter	End Turn
Period	Next Unit
Comma	Previous Unit
Insert/Home/End	Capital City view
Ctrl-C	Construct a Citadel
E	Automated exploration
A	Automated work/ Set unit to alert
B	Settle a city/ Ranged attack
S	Set up artillery

MilitaryUnits

Hotkey	Action
M	Move mode
U	Upgrade unit
E	Automated Exploration
A	Alert mode
F	Sleep mode
Spacebar	Do nothing (skip unit)
Delete	Delete unit
Ctrl-A	Attack
B	Ranged attack
S	Set up Artillery
H	Fortify unitl healed

Civilian Units

Hotkey	Action
B	Found city
A	Build improvements (automated)
R	Construct a Road
Alt+R	Construct Railroad
Ctrl+Shift+R	Route-to Mode
F	Create fishing boats
O	Create Offshore platform
Alt-C	Remove Forest/ Jungle/ Marsh
Backspace	Cancel last order
I	Construct a farm
N	Construct a mine

Great People

Annoyingly, the Great People in the game have very few hotkeys associated with their actions and require lots of mouse clicks, but here are a few that do thankfully have hotkeys.

*Note: the Great Engineer's hotkey to build a Manufactory appears to be broken, putting him in Movement Mode instead.*

Great Person	Hotkey	Action
Great Scientist	A	Construct Academy
Great Merchant	H	Construct Customs House
Great Engineer	M	Construct Manufactory
Great General	Ctrl+C	Construct Citadel
Great Prophet	L	Construct Holy Site

Closing words

Thank you for taking the time to read my guide! I really hope that you have found it useful in some way or another, regardless of your skill level in the game. Please do let me know if there's anything that you can think of that is missing from this guide and I'll do my best to update the guide in good time.

If you would like to read my guide on how to play as England then you can follow my link below:

England Strategy Guide

[Quinloki]

I have 416 hours in this game - and this guide pointed some stuff that I didn't know about. So cheers for that! <3

[Player 1]

Good info, good read!

[Foulkesy]

Thanks Tiquantum and Vildmir, really glad that you liked it and I hope it helped :)

[Cletus Cornelius]

This would of been my surefire guide had I known years ago, great work comrade

[Vlidmir Putan]

amazing guide!