If you really, really, want to control your opponents’ characteristics, but you are on an Emperor game or something, you may want to consider temporarily changing the difficulty level. If you tell a settler to do something and then wait until the 'end of turn prompt comes up, you can reselect him, he will have already done one turn’s worth of work on the job to which you assigned him. Tell him to do the same job again and he will do another turn’s worth of work on it. You can continue this until he is doen whatever he is doing. The do it for all your settlers, if you have the patience. This is also handy for settlers on roads. All you do is take two steps, so the moves left thing says '.1' and then tell the settler to do something. Immediately reselect him and he has his three moves back. The only problem with this is that all of that reselecting and reasigning is accumulative like in the above paragraph, so if you use this cheat to go long distances, your settler may stop somewhere along the line and actually build what you tell him to build (proposterous!). This is really handy if you have a city which is doomed and you want to evacuate. Buy tonnes of settlers and use this cheat to get them to another city instantly. Then press 'B' to settle them in that city. This can really save a city under attack. This cheat can be combined with waterbridging in my strategy guide to build endless waterbridges to nowhere in one turn.

Once the fast settler has built one railroad, move the boat.

Civ 5 cheats that dont resync