I figured I would kick this off with some options on how to deal with some of the tasks you get for quests. Those often include things like:
* Collect <number of> gold / supplies
* Gain <number of> population
* Gain <number of> happiness
I've found that a great way to get these over with is to rely on the buildings you typically tend to get from a Guild Expedition. MY inventory typically is filled up with a bunch of buildings I have no intention of ever using, but that I also don't want to just delete. These are great to easily finish these types of missions, though.
As an example, in order to gain population, there's a few typical ways to go:
1. Build additional residential buildings. However, these cost gold and suppliers, and typically have a waiting period associated with them.
2. Upgrade a GB that adds population (examples are Tower of Babel, Capitol, The Habitat, Innovation Tower). The downside of this is that using this approach will take a considerable amount of FPs to accomplish.
So what to do if you're impatient? Well, I typically tend to keep some free tiles, and when having to deal with a quest like this, I will look at my inventory, and specifically check the Production buildings, as these tend to
cost population. That sounds counter-intuitive, but when you consider that the cost of the population will be subtracted as soon as you plunk down the building, you might see where I'm going with this.
The trick is using this cost to your advantage. So you build the production building (let's say a Shellfish Farm from the Oceanic Future, which costs 1,390 in population. As soon as you build it, your population will decrease with 1,390. You then immediately sell that building, and gain 1,390 population, as well as some gold and supplies from demolishing the building.
That's the same approach I take when it comes to gaining Gold or Supplies in a hurry; I look for buildings cluttering up my inventory, build them, and sell them straight after, to quickly collect these resources.
When it comes to gaining Happiness, you can do the same, and clear out some Cultural or Decoration buildings. I typically end up throwing down a bunch of "
Gate of the Sun God" or "
Face of the Ancient" for this. My reasoning behind that is those buildings tend to come easily in the GE, are useless to me otherwise, and they only take up 2*2 tiles, so placing them consumes very little space. Place, sell. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Other quest goals you might encounter can include things like "loose <amount of> happiness". A very easy way to achieve this is to temporarily break the roads going out from your Town Hall. This prohibits any now disconnected buildings from granting you your bonuses, which tends to cause your happiness to tank, thus full-filling the quest goal. Once you finish the task, simply rebuild the road to reset your happiness boost.
Another goal you might come across every so often is to destroy a building from the previous age. If you are anything like me, you tend to do so on a continuous basis, meaning that you will have very little buildings you actually would not miss from your town. However, a road is somehow also counted as a building. So simply sell as many pieces of road as the quest needs (you might have to build some to meet the specific era criteria, but roads tend to be cheap, and build instantly), and you're good to go.