Do you have options you like playing with?

Advanced/Options

You might want to try enabling the clock--you will thank me ;) Also the NumPad help is great, especially for exploring the map in the first stages of the game.

Automated workers is something that can be helpful when you have many cities, but not in the beginning.

Hight detail terrain, if your computer can take it. Also Show city radius.

In the very beginning, it might be helpful to disable the Wait at the end of turn, for exploring when you have very few units. But if you do not mind pushing Enter, or clicking int the End Turn button, it is always better to control when your turn finishes manually. Still, it makes for a more fluid game at first.

Eventually, with lots ot units, you may profit from the Quick combat, Do not zoom for combat... But that is when you have lots of battles at the same time.

Added: Also, it may be obvious, or not, since some people may miss it, but you can set the native resolution for your monitor and play fullscreen (recommended). The interface looks fine even at very high resolutions (tested up to 2560x1440 here).

Advanced/Options/Graphics

https://www.gog.com/forum/sid_meiers_civilization_series/does_warlords_support_widescreen_resolution/post2

Added2: Not an option but a practice: Did you know that you can name the geographic features in your map? A bit like in Alpha Centauri. It really adds to the game...

I play with the BUG mod (Beyond the Sword Unaltered Gameplay). It doesn't change anything in the game (as the name states), but provides information that is already available in a more accesible way. It informs you of whether another leader is likely going to war (because of the "We've got too much in our hands" message), when and where you are getting your next Great Person, and a lot of other useful information. For a very new player all this information can be overwhelming, but as you become more familiarized with the game it becaomes invaluable (and you can choose exactly what information to display). You can install it once and then it will be loaded automatically every time you launch Beyond the Sword.

Other than that, I always have the resource icons on display, as well as the grid (makes easier to plan my cities location and units movement). I usually end up disabling combat animations because in the late game they take too much time.

Yes, from the middle game onwards everything that can be made to speed up the game is welcome.

I think I will give a try to BUG, thanks for the suggestion.

Changing the automated worker settings to leave existing improvements and forests is beneficial in my view. The automated workers should never override the improvements you manually prioritized, and the decision of when to chop forests hinges on the production queue of the city that benefits so you should definitely handle that manually.

I agree that's useful if you automate your workers... which I never do because I don't trust them (their AI is the same than that of the computer players). But a lot of people consider it's (mostly) harmless in the lategame, if you check this option.

What I do is to tell my workers to "Build trade network", which only allows them to build roads, railroads and build the corresponding improvement for a resource. But that's not a special setting, it's just a worker order.

With respect to planning city locations: With BUG <Alt X> lets you "dot map" potential city locations.


Question about BUG: Does anyone know how to get BUG to work if you use Linux?

I've got it working on Linux. It's been ages since I installed though, so don't remember what I did, if anything, to get it working there. At a guess, it was just to install it in customAssets. It comes in an .exe, I suppose, so it should be possible to launch it via PlayOnLinux. "Run a Windows Executable" in Miscellaneous tab. Probably what I did, though I honestly don't remember. It's been years.

What problems do you have?

Opps, I was confusing Mods. I was thinking of BUFFY (for BtS) not BUG.

I've got that one working too for what it's worth. For that one I remember I had to download some FX files to get it working, but no idea if that is a common problem.