What do you think is the weakest part of your game.

Gumbolt

Phoenix Rising
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Feb 12, 2006
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Not seen this before..

I thought i would get the ball rolling.

1. Planning cities at the start. How many times I get mid game and think I have no great HE, commerce, science or GP farm. Even after a game I look at maps and think theres still no obvious location. Counting food and hill tiles is not something i enjoy doing.
2. losing direction mid game. You know where you just dont know where to take your cities or the AI seems to overwhelm you.
3. Late game wars. I have no idea reguards to helicopters and other units as I rarely reach that stage of a game. :lol::lol:
 
Micromanagement. I really cannot be bothered to fiddle with my cities population constantly.
 
Gumbolt:

I'm right with you on mid-game management. I tend to think I do a pretty solid job initially of getting enough workers built, plotting key city sites, and claiming first the ones at risk of other civs claiming. But I often hit a lull from about COL to lib where all I seem to focus on is getting to lib, and fail to do important things like getting national epic and heroic epic built, and starting to get specialization in cities other than my first 3-4 cities. I tend to find that almost any city coming after the first 3-4 ends up being less than optimally utilized.

I also tend to let early defense slip when I don't early rush and it occasionally costs me. But I often (about 50% of the time) will prioritize GW which will offset that risk. I really like to get infrastructure down early when I can, and sometimes that hurts.
 
But I often hit a lull from about COL to lib where all I seem to focus on is getting to lib

This happens to me often, and I've frankly started to enjoy losing the Liberalism race lately - it opens up so many other possibilities. As long as it's there my natural inclination is to go for it, which makes sense, but sometimes a different strategy is more suitable and I get blinded by Liberalism.

As for the weakest part of my game, probably identifying windows of opportunity with regards to war. It can be difficult to gauge when is the right time to attack who - and with what amount, or kind, of force. Often by the time I make the decision to fully mobilize for war against someone the window's already closing and I don't make it in time - for example, if my target managed to acquire Engineering and built castles everywhere and I don't have enough siege (because I didn't mobilize early enough).

Air warfare is a big weakness of mine since I never use air units, but my games rarely make it that far so it's not often exposed.
 
Diplomacy,closely followed by Espionage..

I hear you on the espionage one. I see games where people have 4-5 spies built just before they declare war. I am the kinda guy that thinks 2 turns into the war... Do i need a spy?.... Ooops.

I never really ever got my head around why you could give culture to a city for 5%. You dont need to know everything to win a game. Just a few basics. :lol:
 
Gathering the energy to think rationally.
Seriously, like 95% of my games are just pointless finger-workouts lacking any kind of brain activity.

When I am thinking, well... Production and wonders especially.
 
In SP.
1. Micromanagement.
2. Espionage.
3. Drifting. Especially in the midgame when there's so much to build, and fairly limited production.

In MP.
!. Experimentation. I should experiment with different openings in SP, not against other people.
 
1. Building a spaceship.
2. Loosing a long term vision [i mean entering mode when i just click next builds]
3. Any situation without target AI to kill.
4. GP farms without wonders. My best ones are Great Library, ToA, NE and go do war:)
 
Everything I just don't understand how I win this game is it dumbed down so much ? or am I playing on too easy a level
Even Noble level players show better city spec then me so how do I win ?
 
Workers. I cannot stand micromanaging every single worker in my 10, 14 city empire.
 
The Globe Theater.

I think I've built it maybe once, even then it was late game. I know its merits (drafting powerhouse city), I just always forget, or never have a huge city with happy issues (I always use that one civic, um, the one where each military unit gives +1 :mischief:)

I'm still waiting to try Dave's Catapult Globe Theater trick but again, I rarely deviate to drama, let alone build 8 theaters (I play HUGE) to then be allowed to build globe.
 
1. Late classical/early medieval expansion. When I'm done with my early cities (usually 6-8) I always find myself sitting down, improving my economy. Often there is still some room to settle or barb city to capture and I'm ALWAYS: "Ok, I'll go there in a few turns, just let me build this XY first". Eventually I move my lazy ass there, but often some AI beats me.

2. Mid-game whipping. After the first switch to caste system, I never switch back to slavery. I know it would be useful, but I never do.

3. Drafting. I do it only as a desperate move and my Globe/drafting city always comes online too late to matter. I know drafting could net some 20 units in a few turns, but still don't do it. As a little excuse, lately I find myself using mass mounted units most of the times and draftees aren't very useful.
 
Diplomacy. The rule of thumb I use to follow is try to keep half of the civs happy with me. The last few games i've played i try to keep everyone happy and now its the mid game and everyone is annoyed/cautious w/ me. I need to pick my targets and keep them happy and plan for the ones to not be happy to be targets for war.
 
The first is deliberate:

I never use Slavery. :)

The second is also deliberate:

I can't be bothered to micromanage worked tile assignments.

The third is not deliberate:

I keep forgetting to double-check whether the AI has assigned the wrong @!##@!!! specialists. :)
 
Micro, early tile work choices, and expansion rate. Some game I hit expo rate perfectly, others it is off. The first two, however, are CONSISTENT holes in my play, and probably what prevents me from easily winning immortal games.

I can't be bothered to compute optimal paths, but that slows down the most important part of the game substantially.

I win on high levels using extremely abusive diplo knowledge - there are a couple people who haven't beaten immortal who often put up more beakers than me.
 
I could say any specific thing but really patience. I honestly feel I am a better player than Noble but I lose patience easily, making rash, heady decisions that get me in big trouble or just bog me down to the point where I alt-f4
 
I'm pretty well-rounded except for using National Wonders. Half the time, I wait because I don't think I know where I want them. Sometimes, I just forget them, or I feel like I need to build something else, or I figure that I want to race for a World Wonder because I can always build National Wonders... There are many a game that go by where I forget to build the Globe, National Epic, Hermitage, National Park, West Point, and the list goes on.

At least I can usually plan a Moai City and Oxford. I feel good about that. :)
 
Overall what I lack the most is a *consistant* ability to focus and synergize all the "micro skills" I've learned into a fully coherent whole that properly leverages map, leader, and game option conditions.

What that means is, I can micro tiles, great. I can build enough workers and keep the army big enough to avoid unwanted DoWs. Great. I can expand enough, great. I know when early war is appropriate and when to expand into sweet empty land. Great. I've even learned how to (partially at least) let go of my tree addiction and CHOP more, great. And so on with just about all the narrow classes of skills we players pick up along the way.

But it's in the realm of putting it all together in an effective, coherent way, that I often get lost and frustrated. Not all the time. Sometimes I'm "on" and owning just seems to come naturally as things click and I naturally/instinctively fit all the micro skills into a mad long-term plan, and so on. But there are other times that the strategic pieces I try to fit together are like square pegs into round holes, and the non-fit and non-synergy doesn't become apparent to me until mid-game when I'm 2nd or 3rd from the bottom of the powergraph wondering how I sunk that low.

It's hard to think of examples off hand, but it's something like: I'll REX and focus on that, and nail down a sweet resource pool, near-orgasmic chokepoints, boxing in nearby AIs, grabbing their resources to nerf them mercilessly, and meanwhile fund the economy up so the expansion can keep at it, and prepare the way to rebuild when the critical land is claimed. Then comes the dreaded "toot toot toot toot toot toot toooooooooooooooot." DoW. What....? OOPS, I forgot to PROTECT that expansion, and now there's a Shaka stack of axes and impis marching toward my warrior-garrisoned cities. SON of a B...OUDICA!

Then it's back to 4000 BC, and I remind myself, "don't forget the military, dammit!" And then that time around I get clobbered by new random events, like a barbarian horde nuke or some other silly series of events, and the opportunity to fix my previous mistakes is lost.

Then I switch to Medieval Total War for a while, in anger, lol.

It's totally my fault, but I just too frequently lost sight of keeping all of the 20 to 30 dimensions of strategy together and holistic and synergetic.

And at the higher levels I just get bored as my every action is a read-off of some walk-through article. No thinking involved (and when I do break away and try to figure it out on my own, obviously I get slammed).
 
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