What was your biggest mistake(s)?

[goodolarchie]

I've played civ since the original, and looking back I never really had a clue what I was doing in civ 4 until I followed some of the strategies on this forum

Less than a year ago I was starting on Warlord and barely winning games because the strategies from civ I-III just don't work in IV! I made some pretty huge mistakes (still do ) and didn't realize the error of my ways until retrospect. I won my first Diety domination game today and was reflecting back on those mistakes.

So what were your biggest mistakes before you started climbing the difficulty ranks? Here were mine:

-oveREXpansion! How about 12 cities by 1 AD running 0% science? Yes!!!

-Trying to build EVERY wonder! I don't think I got out of prince until I gave up getting both stonehenge and pyramids in EVERY game I played. I can't remember the last time I built either...

-Practically 0 city specialization. My placement strategy was: Get as many resources in the BFC and build pretty much every single building!

-No population control, I never really understood how the happy/healthy mechanics worked. My cities would revolt and lose a bunch of food because of my negligence.

-Using the Tokaguwa diplomacy model I don't think I ever so much as opened borders until Monarch because I thought civs would settle in my back-filled land. I NEVER traded techs because I thought that would just help out the enemy advance, when it was I who was becoming backwards. I was the old man telling the kids to get off my lawn.

-GP Misuse. I settled every single one of them, and never ran specialists. In fact I didn't even know you could monitor the GPP, I just thought they were semi-random events.

Yep, I've come a long ways thanks to CFC!

 

[CivilizedTiger]

1. Lack of city specialization. I'm still struggling here, most importantly for cities settled later in the game, or those conquered later in the game, but at least for the first cities, I think I've learnt my lesson. The most painful loss due to lack of city specialization, or rather due to bad specialization, was with Joao. I had a lot of green land, so I settled about 8 commerce cities and I had only 1 production city. And the mistake was even greater seeing as Hannibal and Bismarck were on the continent.

2. Building too much infrastructure. I guess I should learn, at some point, to just build wealth in most cities, as soon as they have a granary. In my last game (second win on monarch , Willem), I was building banks everywhere, for rush-buying faster. But the thing is, 50% extra gold for a city which produces 20 commerce doesn't seem all that great.
The one thing, in this particular game, which I can't yet count as overbuilding, is building harbours and customs houses in all sea cities, considering that I had cities on 4 land masses. Should I count them as overbuilding? Or was it a good idea?

3. Overconfidence. This is probably the most annoying of things. Well, it's not a mistake, it's more of a mistaken mindset. In this last game as Willem, I had 25 or so cities before I went for my last war. I was way up in tech, but I lost patience and thought that my armies were going to be enough against Shaka and both his vassals. I was, in the end, attacking longbowmen and knights with rifles and cannons. But I didn't train a big enough army, I definitely didn't train enough for more than one stack, so once in Shaka's land, we were just playing pass the city. It's even more silly considering that if I had waited 50ish turns more, I think I could have attacked with tanks. (marathon speed)

Anyway, overconfidence is always bad in this game.

 

[ahcos]

most of the things i did (or still doing) wrong are mentioned already, i'd like to add:

1. always using the same, or almost the same, techpath every game with every leader. well, the "usual" alphabet/currency/col -> liberalism line is quite strong in most of the games, as long as you manage the diplomacy you can defend yourself even with axes/spears/archer quite well and it's rather easy to grab liberalism if you beeline it straight. but tech choices tend to be limited (basicly, everthing except nationalism is out - no machinery, no engineering, no banking etc..) and valuable techtrades are limited aswell. after all, losing liberalism isn't that bad if you grab great parts of land and/or can do anything else that will give you a reasonable edge in winning the game.

2. not enough workers. no, seriously, i'm winning emperor and still find myself in this situation quite often.

3. ignoring naval military. barbarians can be incredible embarrassing if you don't have some naval units as soon as their galleys begin to pillage your working boats.

4. i want it all, and that's when i lose it all. you want to be first to music, want to be #1 soldiers/power, you want the circumnavigation bonus, liberalism, first to economics, communism, physics, the most land and the oracle aswell, maybe even found a religion... considering what will give you the most advantage and what is neglectable still gives me a hard time.

 

[whats a navy]

1. I am a huge tech whore so in the early game I trade for every tech I can. Even hunting and archery even though I might have BFC copper. Then in the later came I research alone because no one wants to trade with me. (WFYABTY) Seeing some games played on these forums showed me I don't need to trade for just about everything and sometimes it can actually be bad.

2. Not building a big enough army in peace time. I am always extremely low in power because all those production cities are building wealth (I want to tech more) instead of units. I then through up my hands in disbelief when Monty comes waltzing into my territory taking all my cities. Probably the biggest reason why I lose.

3. Not building wonders. This may sound weird but I can't remember building a wonder besides the Great Library. There are some maps where I am an industrious civ with stone in my BFC and pass some wonders that could've really improved my game. I need to analyze a map and decide if a wonder might be good for me to try for.

 

[Deathstar]

I used to think any tile that was within your culture border was automatically contributing to your empire. Then I had my mind blown with the fat cross.

 

[Inso]

1. Not enough workers for me. I still catch myself not making enough these days even, makes such a difference to early expansion/growth speed having loads of them wandering around. Too many is much better than too few, I realise that now.

2. Wonderwhoring. I think many people do this too much in the early days of playing. As soon as I see stone I had to try for the pyramids, marble had to go for Glib, etc. Nowadays I actually decide whether the map warrants it rather than just building all of them!

3. Prioritising. Actually having a gameplan these days helps too, rather than making it up as I go along hehe

4. Not building any military at all with Montezuma (or other high warprob AI) sitting next door with his borders only touching mine, that used to cause many frustrated reloads.

 

[Jerrymander]

Building too many units. I tend to have about 100 tanks when I only need 30.
I also lose patience in the industrial age.

 

[Ray Patterson]

Teching endlessly for an advantage to start a war. Not realising that chopping can be enough of an advantage, plus the element of surprise. In other words: no axe or chariot rushes, but only starting a first war with swords and cats. I've learned to rush now, and my second Prince domination finished in 1695 instead of 1851!

The no open borders is familiar as well. Trade is so important, but allowing enemy settlers free passage seemed a huge risk (instead of giving you nice targets for which they pay considerable extra maintenance).

And indeed not giving in to demands. I wonder how many people have come up with the idea to do that. It works so much better than in real life. IRL a threatening leader would just demand more after being satisfied. In civ they suddenly like you and stop demanding stuff. Only CivFanatics could teach me that.

By the way, back in '94, when I was 13 and playing Civ I, I hardly ever founded new cities. I'd just have one or two newly founded cities, and would possibly capture more. Why build cities if the AI builds them for you?

 

[Dostojevski]

1.Trading with the strongest and most dangerous civs worst enemy. Took me a long time to figure that it might not be a good think to trade with Shakas worst enemy if he is your stronger neighbour.

2. I always used to try and found my own religion and swap over to it, did not think of the diplomacy at all.

3. Cottages are worthless, or atleast I thought so for a long long time and only used farms/mines.

4. In Civ II I had no idea about what made my costs go up, after a while I figured out it must be the roads you built that cost. So I had a perion where I played without building any roads to keep my costs down

 

[Tyleryn]

1 - my power is 0.50 of shaka and 0.6 of everyone else? whatever, i'll finish the wonder and then start to build units, it will be even better to wait until rifling and steel. Why not?

2 - first to divin right? yeah! Let's convert to islam immediately!

3 - lumbermill allowed, railroad allowed --> 0.5 workers per city !?!??!

4 - why my (meant To be) commercial city can produce the wonder 30% faster than my (meant to be) production city?

5 - often i have no strategy at all on land ( at least until i feel the need to fight ) . Thanks to this forum i could win all my noble ( 2 lvl up in 2 weeks!) games but on prince now i still win 50% of games and most of them are on oceans because i know what is my military strategy : get the sea with frigates/destroyers and starve the enemy to death with embargos ( the entire island usually : closing his trade routes, his import/export and his water tiles ).

my english is bad

 

[Gumbolt]

Buying the game!! Not had much sleep since.

 

[CarlH]

denying requests/demands. Aside from religion, this is by far the easiest way to manage diplo. But i used to get angry at the idea of giving the AI something I worked so hard for.

Now i accede to more requests than I deny, except for joining war requests, which I will only accept if i was either planning to declare soon or the victim is so far away that they do not pose a real threat.

 

[lymond]

Not planning well for battle, resulting in many a war of attrition which basically ruins the game. Added to that is just staying in a war to long regardless of success.

Building the National Park in my Aluminum Co. headquarters. Just Brilliant!

 

[Shurdus]

1 - my power is 0.50 of shaka and 0.6 of everyone else? whatever, i'll finish the wonder and then start to build units, it will be even better to wait until rifling and steel. Why not?

2 - first to divin right? yeah! Let's convert to islam immediately!

3 - lumbermill allowed, railroad allowed --> 0.5 workers per city !?!??!

4 - why my (meant To be) commercial city can produce the wonder 30% faster than my (meant to be) production city?

5 - often i have no strategy at all on land ( at least until i feel the need to fight ) . Thanks to this forum i could win all my noble ( 2 lvl up in 2 weeks!) games but on prince now i still win 50% of games and most of them are on oceans because i know what is my military strategy : get the sea with frigates/destroyers and starve the enemy to death with embargos ( the entire island usually : closing his trade routes, his import/export and his water tiles ).

my english is bad

Welcome to civfanatics, Tyleryn!

My mistake was that I used to use saved games as a crutch. I kept messing around and I wanted to see what would happen if I did move X. Then it backfired and I reloaded and then I went for move Y. When that worked I kept playing from there. This is almost like playing with a foresight, and it is pretty much ruining the game since whenever things do not go your way you can just reload. Not messing around and making things worked with the knowledge I had bumbed my game up since I was now forced to think about my moves more, and therefore I played better.

Also I used to dislike warring of any kind. I hated it because of the micromanagement. Now I feel like warring is something you need to do every once in a while, and it is something you can do in a reasonable time if you get a bit of practise. I used to fire up a new game as soon as the AI declared on me since it meant my doom...

And overbuilding! The reason why I was lost at the very first sight of a DoW was that I did not build enough units. Now I build them whenever I am in doubt, unless I am diplomatically safe. An extra longbow against possible backstabs never hurt anybody.

 

[mail2345]

1. Expansion
2. Attempting to grab all religions
3. Over infrastructure
4. Too few units
5. Not choosing sides in diplomacy
6. Wonder spam

 

[fed1943]

Weak diplomacy and information gathering.

 

[Acidrain]

Most fatal mistakes were for me:
1. Building every building I could in all cities.
2. Build a lot of wonders!
3. Ignoring diplomacy.
4. (I still experience this) Not confident enough in my moves and choices, I always tend to think I do something wrong. Not thinking about that you gotta make the mistake first to learn from it.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Warring to much.
Building to many units in preparing for war, and not attacking soon enough.
Not micromanaging workers enough. After a certain point I get sick of it and auto work them.
Don't do enough diplo managing.

 

[Negator_UK]

1. Buildaholism - Just can't stop building buildings - I keep on making this mistake.
2. Tech pathing - I just can't be bothered to make a proper middle-end strategy sometimes, and I pay for it with a loss.
3. Being Friendly with Cathy, but she cured me of this - She's always toast in games I play now....just dont attack her with cavalry....

 

[Mutineer]

My biggest mistakes always was ignoring diplomacy. Well, looking on a bright side it forced me to develop methods to create big armies fast and just solve problem try brute force.

It all work up to and including immortal level. Only on deity one can not dream of overcoming Ai's try brute force in a course of all game.