I feel like such a noob asking about this, but I'm wondering how many things I should have in my construction queue at once. There is the potential for a huge queue, which seems fine if you know what you want to build and when. But if you have a bunch of stuff in your queue, it seems easy to fall behind the other cultures. Same with tech tree. Do you need to research absolutely everything  in the tech tree, and how many techs do you research at once? I just feel a little bit lost, not having played a game so detailed in such a long time.

I would advise to start without putting anything in your production & research queues. Once you are more familiar with the game, you'll be able to use them easily :)

You won't miss anything as the game will let you know that a queue is empty.

As for putting stuff in your construction que, I tend to have about 6-12 in there most of the time. If you have really high industry output, then you can complete more than 1 building each turn. The problem is that you have to think about your adjacent bonuses, what are you going to build and where.

Same thing really for the technology research. At the beginning of each new era, what I do, is pick which techs I want and what order I want them in. Once you complete one it it automatically start on the next one.

I'm going to recommend to always have at least one thing in your queue. Because if you forget and finish building something, there is wasted production on that turn. If you have something in the queue, then it will apply it to that building.

It's very easy to shift stuff around in the queue and also delete stuff, so there's never any downside to having something in there. Your production always only applies to the current building and if that finishes, the next one. So whether you have 1 or 20 things in your queue, there's no difference to your production level.

Planning ahead and putting stuff in queue helps, because you can get easily distracted and forget what layout you planned.

But I agree with Scar here, starting out it may be better to complete projects piece by piece to see how they change the output, get a feeling for how adjacency and exploitation works and figure out priorities of certain infrastructures.

Dayvit78 wrote:

I'm going to recommend to always have at least one thing in your queue. Because if you forget and finish building something, there is wasted production on that turn. If you have something in the queue, then it will apply it to that building.

The surplus is not wasted, neither for construction nor for research.

For research it is instantly applied to the next technology you choose (as for discoveries or osmosis event if you have nothing in research queue). That's how you can sometimes have a "free" instant tech (0 turn).

For construction, the surplus is even displayed near the construction queue, and is applied next turn to the district/infra you choose (so you can change your mind during the turn you have surplus). The preview of the cost even displays it: "final cost (total cost - surplus)". And if your surplus is more than the cost of the construction you have chosen, it can be applied to a second one (so you have a "free" construction, but only effective next turn).

Evolena wrote:

Dayvit78 wrote:

I'm going to recommend to always have at least one thing in your queue. Because if you forget and finish building something, there is wasted production on that turn. If you have something in the queue, then it will apply it to that building.

The surplus is not wasted, neither for construction nor for research.

For research it is instantly applied to the next technology you choose (as for discoveries or osmosis event if you have nothing in research queue). That's how you can sometimes have a "free" instant tech (0 turn).

For construction, the surplus is even displayed near the construction queue, and is applied next turn to the district/infra you choose (so you can change your mind during the turn you have surplus). The preview of the cost even displays it: "final cost (total cost - surplus)". And if your surplus is more than the cost of the construction you have chosen, it can be applied to a second one (so you have a "free" construction, but only effective next turn).

That's very true !

Evolena wrote:

The surplus is not wasted, neither for construction nor for research.

Thank you! I never noticed that :)

The only situation when construction queue is actually important is when you have enough industry to build multiple units in one turn. If you queue them up, they will spawn in one stack and be able to move immediately. If you build them one at a time, each one will be delayed by a turn.