I selected the hard setting for the first game and started playing. 100 turns in, it was obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. So I read the manual (wasted effort) and started again. Not much help but as in Civ, the ai developes faster, so just go out and conquer AI cities. But two things are real annoying and I'd love a little help.

1. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to make tile improvements. I looked and looked and found nothing. I finally turned on mayors and half my civ was improved like magic. I know I'm missing something basic, but I would really appreciate any help. Please be specific, help a senior today.

2. I have an 233 speed machine. (ordering a much faster one tomorrow) I though I was playing civ MP it took so long. It's so slow between turns. It takes forever to open a city screen. Is this normal. What options can I turn off to speed it up? I can take a nap in the time it takes to start the game and load up a saved game.

*M*E*N*U*********->***
*....................*
*....................*
*....................*
*....................*
*[------]............*
*[------]............*
*[------]....@@^^^^oo*
*[------]....@@----oo*

"->" is the shovel (public works) icon. (some people think it looks like a hammer). The amount of public works you have is displayed here.

[------]
[------]
[------]
[------] represents the inset global map.

"QQ"
"QQ" - represents the clock-like feature with icons for army, empire, city production, etc.

^^^^^ represents the tabs for frankly I forget exactly what, (Empire, Units, ???, PWs) but one of them accesses public works. Each one actually looks more like:

::________::
:/::::::::\:
/::title?::\

(pretend the colons are spaces)

or maybe it has an icon. I haven't played for a week -- waiting for the WesW mod to get stable.

oo
oo - represents the area in which you select what tile improvement you want to use. Notice the four categories: land/water/special/Terraforming. Special includes forts (which extend your empire's borders two tiles, and give you vision BUT NOT OF UNITS!) and
radar/sonar placements and Obselisks (for science victory). Terraforming allows you to change useless terrain to useful terrain, but at a high cost.

Amount of public works per turn == selected in F1 (empire) screen as % of production.

And yeah, looking forward to a much faster machine.
It ran ok the first 100 turns.

Page 15 on the manual.