How do I stop being a perfectionist?

Piquito2223

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 1, 2021
Messages
7
Every time I play, I always seek to achieve the perfect game with no mistakes. Fail to complete a wonder? I quit and start a new game. My army fails to beat the enemy and have to waste another 10 turns to raise a new army, failing behind in technology? Start a new game. Build the Pyramids and forgot to change the government civics? I start a new game, and so on...

This habit of mine makes me frustrated and unable to enjoy the game as it should be. What should I do?
 
We all dream of playing the perfect game.

To make the best decision every time.

Mistakes are sickening sure, but that just makes the good parts better.


The best way I have found to get past perfectionist tendencies is to watch Sulla's civ survivor series.

After watching the absolute knuckleheads that are the AI play against each other, no mistake feels bad anymore.

All the nonsense that goes on in the dark fogged tiles is revealed.


My mouse accidentally declares war sometimes against an AI I try to contact, and I just play through it now as a fun random event.

If the end game feels boring, just try to win in as few turns as possible.

It brings the fun right back.
 
Every time I play, I always seek to achieve the perfect game with no mistakes. Fail to complete a wonder? I quit and start a new game. My army fails to beat the enemy and have to waste another 10 turns to raise a new army, failing behind in technology? Start a new game. Build the Pyramids and forgot to change the government civics? I start a new game, and so on...

This habit of mine makes me frustrated and unable to enjoy the game as it should be. What should I do?

Hey Piquito2223

I don't know if this will be helpful to you, but I have a similar problem with another game from this era of gaming, Medieval II Total War. (Stainless Steel 6.4, ofc)

Spoiler Click here and read about my experiences with M2TW :
At one point I had an unofficial world record for beating the game in the shortest number of turns, for both the short campaign and the long campaign of the vanilla game, and capture all provinces.

That involved playing the same "civ" over and over again from the start, trying to perfectly capture all the available territory in the fewest number of campaign turns.

Not only playing for perfection but trying to solve for ways to beat it even faster by rerouting. If you lose a single battle, you have to start again. All the battles you fight, you're drastically outnumbered almost always, and you still have to win the fight.

Once I stopped playing for this particular achievement, it was difficult to play the game "normally".

I'd play, but because I instinctively know better pathing and how to cheese battles and how to abuse this or that game mechanic to become instantly much stronger, I couldn't play the campaign slowly and realistically and play the game as intended.

I basically had to avoid all the Catholic and Muslim factions because all of them have access to crusades or jihads, which grant your troops bonus movement and no upkeep per turn, making massive armies move swiftly across the world, and cost next to nothing other than hiring them.

So I forced myself to play factions like the Byzantine Empire, the Kievan Rus, the Novgorod Rus, Lithuania, and so forth. Or I'd have to try to get myself deliberately excommunicated from the Catholic church, just to deny myself the crusade mechanic. Once it gets rolling, it's hard to resist the urge to just create and send more free armies everywhere. There's almost no downside to going deep into debt once the crusade ends if you have the most powerful army on Earth in rich foreign territory you can then conquer with ease.

But playing those factions which absolutely cannot conquer the world quickly because they have no crusade mechanic, that meant all my armies had to be paid for every turn, there was far less benefit to creating an unsustainably large army, and all my armies had to move at normal speed, making the AI more difficult to conquer. Or rather, more of a challenge and slower to conquer. Actually beating them wasn't much of a brain teaser, it just involved more effort.

Slowing the campaign down required me to focus more on growth and economy, and not having access to crusader mercenaries meant actually building proper barracks and so forth, to gain access to better troops, and not just peasant and spearmen spam, generals, and holy mercenaries everywhere.

That changed my strategy for most factions. I'd focus on getting at least one fortress level castle settlement, for access to later game feudal elite units, and much better archers, cavalry archers, or heavy cavalry. Whatever the really good units for that faction happened to be.

Deliberately cutting off all the ways the campaign could go "perfectly" stopped me from going into the old "blitzmaster" routine of trying to conquer the world in X number of turns. I found myself instead focusing on ways of sustaining my own units and preventing them from taking casualties, because when you slow the campaign down that much, deny yourself endless free holy mercenary units, deny yourself the vast movement bonuses, and having expensive units that can't be hired in every settlement, that means for me to actually go relatively "fast", I had to stop my own troops from dying in battles.

That meant focusing less on brute forcing every battle and busting down every gate and attacking every fortification head on and letting my troops die and be replaced with new mercenaries. It meant I had to take this group of infantry, cavalry, and archers, and keep almost all of them alive while I took 20 settlements with them.

Which meant focusing on building armies that included more elite units, longer range more professional archers, and good cavalry or cavalry archers, so I could kill enemy soldiers without losing so many of my own.

In fact, the goal for every battle was to lose as few individual soldiers as possible, rather than complete the battle this turn.

So I would even wait out certain battles I was sure I could win, laying siege to certain castles and cities with a superior army, but one designed for waiting them out. Cheaper, more archers and cavalry to defend against sallying forces, as opposed to spamming infantry to just brute force the city.

It took a very long time, but I learned that it was quicker to wait out certain cities surrendering without a fight, than lose 1/3 of my troops, stall out my offensive, have to go back and replenish my troop numbers at a friendly settlement built for troop recruitment, and then get all the way back to the front line without losing what territory I gained.

There are very different tactics and a completely different overall strategy for playing slowly. But I find that my perfectionist tendencies are helping me sustain these slower campaigns, because I now do things like "Conquer the Kingdom of England in the fewest number of turns", which involves invading and subduing one particular faction while losing the least amount of troops per battle, so that I can continue conquering them right away and maintain whatever gains I have made, because my armies are at essentially full strength the entire time.

Battles would end up going like this:



Where most of my casualties came from my general's bodyguard units which refill automatically over time, and some cavalry losses which can be replaced quickly since cavalry move swiftly across the campaign map, and this is bottom tier cavalry anyway.

I'd be preserving my infantrymen to the point where, many battles, I wouldn't lose a single infantry soldier.

And I'd have an entire extra army full of archers, to defend those infantry and cause the enemy to run away so my cavalry would cut them down. Safely tucked behind the infantry line, and under AI control with orders to stand still.

With good micromanagement, I'd be eliminating 1500 to 2000 enemy soldiers per battle while losing maybe 40 individual soldiers in the process.

This is wildly different from blitzing, where there's no way to keep your own soldiers alive, you're outnumbered 10 to 1 or worse in some battles and have to win the whole thing with just a couple units of light cavalry, and when it's over, yes you won, but those light cavalry are almost dead and you need to hire more mercenaries ASAP.

This is a long winded way of saying, there are ways you can turn your own perfectionist tendencies into something that tries to find a "NEW" and different way of playing perfectly. Rather than focusing on speed and number of provinces taken in a single turn, I changed my goal to (I cannot use X and Y utterly broken mechanics, and I have to win the game using my own legitimate soldiers) and that meant keeping those soldiers alive in order to maintain their combat effectiveness.


It might be a different situation for you, in a different game, but let's think about ways of turning things around for you.

Let's take something that can be out of your control: Failing to complete a wonder, because the AI had a great start and was just able to speed the wonder to completion before you, or it would cripple your empire's development to complete it first. Both outcomes are bad.

Well, what you can do is play to specifically avoid both outcomes. If you limit the building of a wonder only to situations where you can almost 100 percent of the time be assured that you are going to complete it (prerequisite techs gotten, city prepared to build it, forests pre-chopped, slavery ready for population whipping...) within a turn or two, as opposed to slow building it, then you will almost always get the wonder you want, and in all other cases, the wonder you want is then something you have to capture, with an army.

Take the probability out of it, or largely out of it. And if you absolutely want to remove the probability, then if you fail to build the wonder in the turn or two it takes to whip it good, then reload I guess. Or takes your chances on the 99% chance you get it legally.

Now, about your army failing to beat another army. Try to reduce the probability factor.

Yes, if you're trying to blitz the AI and beat them quickly, without ruining your economy, then you're trying to capture this city and that city and so on and so forth with an army that is logically capable of beating the AI, but can by chance take too many losses and then your attack stalls.

Well if your army was stronger, more advanced, you had better siege, more promotions, more bombardment, more collateral damage, and you had far more units to spare, then conquering a particular city stops being a probability thing. It becomes farfetched for you to lose.

Reducing the reliance on odds by simply building more and better units requires more planning ahead and more patience before rushing the AI, but the extra time and effort planning it out means you'll likely have things like great generals and super medics that can heal your entire army while moving, stuff like that. You end up losing just some of your artillery and almost none of your regular units that keep getting stronger and more promoted.

basically, you're doing what I'm doing with M2TW: You're reducing the odds the enemy can actually win down to essentially zero, and you're making your margin of victory enormous. Not only enormous, but comically overpowered, and overkilling it.

The idea here is that when you finish conquering the AI, you should have more units than when you began the war, not less. And they should be far stronger than when you started, much more veterans, more promotions, and at full strength.

Then the wars stop being a matter of rolling the dice. There will be losses during the 1 in 10 chance your much stronger unit loses in combat while attacking, sure. But it won't be every combat. After reducing the enemy cities' defenses and causing units inside the city to have collateral damage, after the initial assault, almost every combat is an auto win, an auto promotion. While taking land, your army is getting stronger. The entire campaign is a cakewalk other than replenishing your artillery and the odd unit here or there.

That reduces the probability, and plans ahead for the losses. Assume you lose 1 in 10 units over the course of the campaign, outside of artillery, and replace them as you conquer, and keep generating more artillery units.

That means the RNG will screw your units over the whole campaign about what you'd expect from lots and lots and lots of dice rolls, reducing the swingy-ness of the outcome.

If you need to blitz an AI neighbor early and you're doing it by ancient or iron age cavalry rushing them, and you have just enough power to probably take the city 60 percent of the time, 40 percent of the time you lose every unit, lose the entire war, and fail your whole campaign and need to start over.

If you don't fight a war that has a 40 percent chance of losing your entire attacking army in the first place, it stops being a matter of needing the RNG to win the day for you.

If you instead fight wars where you could experience RNG screwing you 5 times in a row, and it won't even come close to affecting the outcome of the war, that's planning ahead and playing against the probability factor. If you instead make sure you can sustain a large army for a while, and the army is strong enough to wipe out your specific enemy 3 times over, then even if the RNG really, really screws you, you end the war strong enough to beat that same enemy 2 more times, having lost an army that's big enough to conquer it once. But you had reserves. Lots and lots of reserves.

Overkill means RNG isn't a big deal. And it also means, if the RNG screws you bad, you just reduced the upkeep of your already too large army.

Plan for those losses. Plan to replace them. Plan so that if they happen, it is to your advantage since you couldn't really sustain that many units anyway.

Make it so that literally all of the outcomes that could ever really happen under the sun, end with you winning. Don't let the RNG decide the outcome of the war.

Be so strong before declaring the war that you crush them so overwhelmingly that there was never any doubt.

Look at the numbers I brought to this battle:



I brought 3,644 soldiers to a battle that I know from my blitzing days, I could have won with just the 6 units of cavalry highlighted. So roughly 300 cavalrymen at the start of the combat, and I could have defeated that English army of over 1,300 soldiers, including a general and some cavalry and a lot of infantry and archers.

I know, if I were blitzing and not caring about casualties, I win that battle against the English using JUST my cavalry 9/10 times. I'd have to misclick, charge wrong, or otherwise blunder away my general, in order to lose it.

But at the end of that battle, even if I won, I'd have almost no cavalry left.

So, now I'm bringing 3300 additional soldiers to that battle, and I'm making sure almost all my cavalry also survive, and that the chance of the English winning this battle is not just zero, the chances of them killing 100 of my soldiers is almost zero.

I'm not just winning this battle, I'm always overwhelmingly winning this battle to an absurd level of overkill. And I'm doing the same thing the next battle, and the next, and the next.

And when I reach London or Nottingham and they have good soldiers behind good walls and I'd actually lose some 400 troops taking their castle or city, I wait my butt outside their gates like a patient overlord of death and destruction, and the English starve to death before they ever face me on the field. Often surrendering without a single soldier lost.

I took the probability away. I took the chance I could possibly lose away. I took away the chance I'd even lose more than 100 soldiers.

I took away any chance whatsoever for the English to ever win this war, ever win a single battle, ever recapture a single one of their provinces, ever even remotely reduce the overall strength of my forces.

13 turns into the grand campaign, France defeated England, and when France did, France had an army that was much, much, much larger, stronger, and more veteran than it had when the conquest began. Usually by turn 13, France is still trying to capture settlements that are considered part of France.

I didn't only not lose many troops, the whole time I conquered England my army swelled in size and strength. As they were weakening I was getting stronger than ever, every turn, so that at the end of the war, I was strong enough to take on a Scotland if they ever betrayed me, I was strong enough to take on Spain and Aragon and Genoa combined, and even push back the Holy Roman empire, even if all of these empires attacked me at once. And I was allied to the strongest of those, virtually guaranteeing that the worst opponent I could face wouldn't be joining in such a dogpile.

That's eliminating the RNG. It's eliminating the unknowns. It's eliminating the risk. There are now a range of possible outcomes where I win with 5000 total healthy fighting troops, or merely 4900 total healthy fighting troops. Those are the best and the worst case scenarios, and there's no possibility of anything else even happening.

During this invasion of England, Spain attacked me, and took Bordeaux. But, you see, I was already making replacement armies for my replacement army. I simply marched it south and retook it. My units weren't in Bordeaux, and if someone moved in to take Bordeaux, they would certainly lose that army.

Much much more powerful than Scotland, allied to Scotland, more powerful than the HRE, allied to the HRE, at peace with Genoa, and with an army that's 10 times larger than Spain's entire forces, I'm marching south to conquer Spain now.

It literally didn't matter here, that the 1 in 20 chance of Spain skipping attacking Aragon or Portugal or the Moors happened, and they invaded France.

I got terrible, terrible, terrible RNG for Spain to skip straight to Bordeaux. In 15 years of playing, Spain's never done that to my Frances.

It literally didn't matter if it did happen, though, because my new way of playing is ultra overkill. I could have ran over Scotland and Genoa and Aragon and Spain at the same time. I've done it before.

But just because I CAN do it doesn't mean I now play in a manner that compels me to take that risk. If I did all that, my reputation might get so bad that the HRE breaks its alliance with me because the Pope called a crusade on me.

That can get dicey, and I still win, but I probably lose more settlements and the fighting grinds to a frustrating standstill for a while.

Yes, I probably still win all that, but why would I be stupid enough to take such a chance, when the odds of me winning and emerging from a war with any single empire much stronger than I started is literally 100 percent.

I'll choose the decision making path that ends in me winning and being much stronger than I started, now. That's true perfectionism.

Take your perfectionism and turn it against the RNG. Make the RNG no longer a determining factor.

Bring 3300 extra soldiers to a fight that only requires 300 to win 9 times out of 10.

Bring 20 trebuchets to attack the neighboring AI in Civ IV, when you're pretty sure you could take the first city with 3 of them.

Yeah, if you rush it, you could probably take that city, losing all your artillery, and severely wounding your army, and win that battle. And if RNG kills you and other empires attack you, you're screwed.

Remove the RNG. Make it so that even if the RNG screws you terribly, you've got 17 trebuchets left, and an army large enough to absolutely win defensively if another AI joins in the war unexpectedly.

Make sure your flanks have longbowmen and can whip more longbowmen, your border cities are on hills, those cities are connected by roads to your main troop production cities, make sure you can absolutely obliterate the AI you're attacking without a single reinforcement unit, so if you're attacked, your troop production units go directly to your second front, to defend against the betrayer AI.

Make it so that in order for you to lose this war, all AIs declare war on you at once.

Okay, so you probably lose that. But that happens less than 1 time in 100 games.

That means you can play 99 out of 100 games. Which means you're not restarting due to AI screwing you or RNG screwing you.

Be like Sun Tzu, win the war before it is declared. Win the next war before you win the one you're fighting. Win the war against someone attacking you unexpectedly by expecting it and having a plan that always wins that war, too.

Win the war before it begins.

Win the battle before it begins.

Make it so you're losing 1 unit for every 10 your enemy loses. Be upset if your margin of victory is not that high. Correct your battle plans so you never fail that often.

Falling behind in technology? If you are conquering AI cities and accepting capitulation or cease fires for tech deals, your science slider can often go to zero. You can redirect science funding to pure gold to support your armies and upkeep costs, and create a core interior of your empire that can never really be attacked by a neighboring AI and all those cities do is generate beakers and build libraries and run scientists.

Have the outer provinces defend and generate gold to keep themselves afloat, have some interior cities running gold and markets and merchants. Cottage up some places. Land and conquest means that you will eventually have a good economy, because the AI always builds up some good settlements to own.

Destroy settlements that will never be good and always be a drag on your economy. Gift them to an ally you want to never backstab you, and want them to go to war with you.

Use the enemy AI advantages to your advantage. For example, in Medieval 2, the AI gets bonuses to growth, gets like scripted free money out of nowhere, making many factions filthy rich even though their land actually cannot generate that much gold, they end up with like 100,000 gold a few turns into the campaign just because the AI gets to cheat. They get bonuses.

They build up cities fast, they poof infrastructure into existence out of thin air, they make fortresses faster than you can, and they generate armies out of thin air even though they do not have the barracks to build that many units that fast.

The AI cheats. It's so that it provides me with a challenge.

What do I do?

I take their land, and their cheated infrastructure, and their cheated faster growing cities, and their cheated later game barracks, and their cheated fortresses, and their cheated tens of thousands of gold, and I sell them back their own stupid provinces that I want grown faster, in exchange for 3,000 gold per turn when the danged thing only generates 700 gold per turn.

I take the AI's strength and I use it against them. Their gold fuels my economy. Their land either expands my economy or builds my late game units early. Their growing of provinces that will be mine eventually only helps me.

Sometimes I can conquer a neighboring AI right now, and I deliberately wait for them to get rich, fat, and developed first. All that money poofing out of nowhere? A fortress for free? City walls for free? Late game barracks for free, much earlier than I could make them?

Sure, AI. you go ahead and cheat. You cheat real good.

Everything you do only makes me stronger. If the AI just directly spawned lots and lots of cheated armies and they did nothing to the growth or the infrastructure, it would be much harder.

If the AI in Civ IV only got large, free armies and they were terrible at making cities that were worth a darn, terrible at researching, terrible at fighting wars with their allies, terrible at using workers to improve tiles, maybe the AI would be more difficult to defeat in Civ IV.

Instead, you can build up a massive army, take their wonders, take their better land, their improved land, their workers, their research, and inherit a massive economy, and subjugate them, and have a vassal state that does research for you, expands into land you can't afford to settle and upkeep, and helps you fight in wars.

Use the AI strength against the AI. Use their bonuses against them. Use their free gold generated out of nowhere to fuel your own economy by begging from rich and powerful friendly allies. Trade resources from conquered lands for really large amounts of gold per turn from rich allies and trade partners.

Use the AI's perfect growth and tile improvements that they worked so hard on to have built cities with built infrastructure and improved land and settled great people and wonders and scientific research, and take it all from them.

Turn them into puppet states and let those bonuses belong to part of your own empire.

That's how you can overkill the game. Seize advantages you can't create by yourself, and take it from the AI who has less upkeep costs and more free units and more free gold and better tech research rates.

The AI is a cheating bastage. So conquer them with overkill, and make those cheating bastages fight your wars, settle your land, generate your research, generate your gold, trade you their resources, build your wonders.

Don't try to do it all yourself. Don't try to beat the AI when there's even a chance you can fail. Instead, overkill. There's no kill like overkill.

In real life, if you wanted to conquer another country, you really have to have an army that's like 10 percent of the size of the entire population, and that army has to be at least 10 times stronger than the defender's army. And you still should do everything you can to not lose troops to attrition.

Real conquering requires excessive amounts of overkill. When such overkill exists, there's not much chance of the population revolting, or taking up arms, or the war even lasting very long.

When the defending army has zero point zero chance of holding, and they're all slaughtered, and there's a soldier for every 10 unarmed civilians, so no rebellion could ever possibly win, and the control of arms is imposed by the conquerors to keep the civilians disarmed, that's a war the conquerors can win.

There may always be resistance, but the land will belong to the conquerors, and the economy will belong to the conquerors. It the situation stays the same for a whole generation, a whole new army can be conscripted.

At least, that's how wars worked before atomic warfare and chemical warfare and all that. Now it's a different measure, but if we're talking games like Civ IV and Medieval 2 and most grand strategy war games, there are certain principles you can follow that will ensure success.

Don't pick fights you can't win, and when you do pick fights, make it so that you'd win that same fight even if it was 10 times more resistance than you are actually facing off against. Make sure you'd ALWAYS win that same fight even if it was 10 times harder.

So you always win, and you always win by a crushingly overwhelming amount, so whatever gains you make do not reverse. Ever. Under any circumstances, even highly unlikely, unforeseen circumstances.

Hit ants with sledgehammers, and there's a chance millions of them could swarm you and bite you to death. If you instead drop poison gas on them that would kill them all instantly, and then drop 10 times that amount of poison, the ants aren't going to bite you to death.

I guarantee it.

That's what Palpatine would do. He'd use his entire clone army and point it at the Jedi, and hunt down every single Jedi with overwhelming force, basically wiping them all out. And while he did eventually die, he did conquer most of the galaxy, kill almost every single Jedi, and achieved literally all of his goals except for turning Luke.

Dude came that close. And he did come that close because he didn't send one Sith Lord or two Sith to kill each Jedi, he sent the entire galaxy after each Jedi.

And that's how you kill Jedi good and proper. It's how you conquer England. It's how you stop getting frustrated by RNG. It's how AI backstabbing you in Civ IV is not a resettable event.

There's no kill like overkill.
 
You can bet that the Pope excommunicated me real quick.

No worries. By the time the first crusade he calls on any Muslim faction ends, I'll be far too powerful for all of the Catholic armies on Earth combined.

And if I wanted to avoid his wrath absolutely flawlessly, I can just gift the crusade target to a Catholic ally in good standing with both me and the Pope, ending the crusade and stopping the invasion of my lands.

Not even pointy hat boi can stop me. Besides, I get a nice Antipope out of the deal. Now who's the Pope? The answer is always me.
 
Very insightful post. I'll try that strategy. I'm a guy who likes to make gambles by sending all the units I can spare without lowering the research to 0%. My problem is that the AI always conspires against me. The last game I had on Deity, I was playing as Russia. Had a bad start, and took me a lot of turns to get access to Iron and mass produce Swordsmen. But I had good relationships with everyone by having open borders and sharing the same religion. My neighbor was Hannibal and he didn't want to attack me despite him being more advanced than me. But it happened the unexpected... Gilgamesh who was north from Carthage and far from me, had the audacity of sending me a stack of swordsmen and catapults, and there was nothing I could do about it.
 
Just remember that it is possible.

There's also hard knowledge of which AI personalities attack at pleased, or friendly, and which ones are more or less warlike.

If a certain AI you know cannot declare at pleased even if someone tries to bribe them to war, then the only worry on that border is other AI with open borders with them who attack through their land.

Scouting can keep an eye on troops advancing through such territory and allow you to stack some defenders in time.

Also keep in mind, the AI is more likely to declare war on you if their army strength is similar or stronger than yours, or if you're already at war with someone they like or don't hate.

If you're a beastly army, you can defend, and it also has the effect of they don't want to DOW on you in the first place unless they dislike you and are warlike or on their border.
 
There's also the exceptions to when they can or can't declare if they have joined in a permanent alliance or vassal/master agreement with another AI. Then the diplomacy score is averaged between the two and then they can be more unfriendly as a group than their individual diplomacy score would suggest.

Catapults are great for upgrading to trebuchets or cannons, but in the early game, they're also great for preemptive strikes against an attacking stack of invaders. Soften them up with the cats and then crush what remains with combat promoted strong units.

Gets you great war score versus that empire, gets you promotions, gets you great general, and gets your land defended real good.

Skip trebs for this strategy and go straight to cannons if you are worried about invasions around the time cannons can happen. Trebs aren't so good for non seige.
 
archers to longbows, catapults to cannons, and some horse archer or knight or strong 2 move units are great for defense and sniping invaders.

Even if you can't wipe out the enemy attacking stack fully, if you can hit their catapults with flanking horse archers, strong units with catapults to reduce their fighting strength and stack collateral damage, and use units with first strikes like longbows and stick them on a hill fort or in your city, you can fend off larger attacking forces.

If it weakens them enough that they can't strike you back on their turn, and make you lose your defenders, you can rush them into your city and let them come attack you there. longbows in walls and their seige got busted, gives you time to reinforce.

Sometimes it only takes 2 or 3 extra turns for you to replenish your forces. And yours heal faster.

I often wish I could get the AI to attack me when I want them to. I want the promotions and great generals, and having invaders attack my culture protected territory, my culture fortified cities, within my road network, where I can snipe them before they even get to my city walls, makes me powerful.

Definitely think ahead. Know where your culture borders are likely to be, and the extent you can settle your land, and make sure you're connected by road to your border lands, and that you have a plan for defending those cities. Put them on hills if possible. If you cannot, then make sure the border is flat and clear of forests, and there are no hills to stand on while marching toward your city. If there are, put your forces on that hill and fortify it and make sure it's connected by road to the flat land where they're likely going to invade.

Use the movement bonuses you get for being on a road in your territory and strike from that fort if they try to go around it. It defends every flat adjacent tile superbly, and also defends the next tile out fairly well due to the road.

Units that can move 2 tiles, catapults, and longbowmen. Those are your core defensive units until you get cannons. Anything that can flank, get first strikes, get bonuses on hills, negate first strikes, cause collateral damage.

Note that those defensive units can absolutely be used as the core of your offensive army. Just start building Trebs when you need to switch your army to an offensive posture, and make sure you have lots of infantry style units that are cheap and fast to spam out and relatively strong.

Have 20 axemen instead of 10 sword if you can. A lot of the time, when you're taking a city, you can defeat it on the first turn if you've weakened the defenders with catapults and trebuchets, but it doesn't matter if you beat the defenders with a sword or an axe or a bow or a horse, what matters is you have enough attackers.

I find that if I can spam a ton of archers and axes to go with those trebuchets, those are faster to make and it allows me to actually attack more times in a given turn.

Those units aren't as strong as swords, sure. But they're quicker to make, quicker to replace, and more of them means I never barely don't take the city. I always have another unit that can finish the task.

Swords are great for attack. Just remember, an axe can beat a depleted longbowmen who has been ravaged by trebuchets. Longbowmen can defeat longbowmen which are damaged. Archers, chariots, axemen, a lot of units is better than a few strong ones.

Don't neglect your strong ones. Have many to defend your stack, but your stacks are better when they have lots of units in them, not just maxed out strong units.

Your most expensive unit to create and spam won't get spammed as much as axes and archers and chariots and so forth. More units means more attacks, and most of the actual combat-combat and damage is being done by your trebs and catapults.

Those are your real combat units. A massive swarm of medium tier units will mop up better than half as many swordsmen will, because you're weakening those units when they attack. You lose one, it's a bigger deal.

You lose an archer or a chariot attacking a longbow that's at 2 strength, it's no big, especially when you've got 20 more.

Strong is good, but more is sometimes stronger than strong.
 
assume every empire on the board is your enemy, and have a plan of defense for if they betray you.

If it overlaps with what you'd like to do anyway, like attack, I am sure you can find a use for longbows and catapults and 2 move units in both your defensive border guard, and then in your attacking army.

Until that army is needed, those troops are your border defense. That's what you build first, as opposed to swords.

If a border with another empire is friendly, assume the AI behind that AI is not and could attack through that land. Be ready to defend that border even though it's technically a friendly border. It can be a vector for a different disease, so keep your mask on.

Clear every border of forests and try not to have hills as a route of attack toward your city. Make sure the city itself is on a hill, or it's surrounded by flat land in the direction of a possible attacker.

By keeping in mind future invasion dangers, you can place your cities, clear those forests, road those tiles, even prepare a fortification if needed, and start stacking archers and catapults, then longbows, then 2 move units, all in your border cities. That's where you build up your offensive forces, before you declare war. Start with the units that would defend your stack or whittle down enemy walls first, because they double as border defenders.

Win that war 1,000 years before it gets declared, by assuming this territory is going to be a warzone someday. Make a plan for defense, road up, chop forests and turn them into defending units and catapults, fort up. Barracks up. Mine stuff. Make sure you're good to pump out units.

Once you have the means to produce units fast, have lots of defenders on the border, and the border is clear of cover for attackers to use against you, and have roaded your border, now you're ready to defend against surprise attacks by land. Which is how the AI prefers to attack anyway.

You will be more prepared when you assume the backstab will happen and plot against it from before you even place those border cities. You know well in advance that those cities will likely form a border with the neighboring empire for a long time.

Knowing that means planning the defense of those cities even before you place them. And placing them for optimal defense.

Sometimes optimal isn't good because you miss out on capturing important resources, I know. But on deity, getting that resource may not win you the game, but losing that border province will lose you the game.

Balance out what's more important. sometimes it means planning to war with that peaceful neighbor to take their land and that resource, and not placing your border cities optimally for peacetime.

It's more important to place your cities optimally for wartime. When you capture a lot of AI cities and take their resources from them, you will have better land and be able to keep up with the AI's initial peacetime expansion economically.

If you try to have 6 cities optimally placed for peacetime economics and can't defend against an attack well, you could be stuck at 6 cities for a very long time.

You should care about your first 6 cities, but if you play well, they don't have to be quality perfect cities. You can move your capitol to the heart of an AI empire you conquer, which has been developed for economics and built wonders and markets and libraries.

Your initial 6 cities can be garbage that pump out units. Don't worry about those cities being perfect. Just make them strong for wartime and don't fall too far behind in tech before you can expand while defending.

Cottage up a city or run specialists, but most of your starting cities should focus on being able to produce units.

Settle forested places, a lot. Chop those forests and make farms and mines. That's where your troops come from. Chop em fast, build up population, and slavery whip them into existence.

Tech up to catapults and longbows, and spam the heck out of the units you need. Then grab economically viable land.

If you expand your empire far enough and your original land is still at the heart of your empire and it makes sense for your capitol to be there, cottage it up, or farm it and run specialists.

But you're on a war footing, with the expectation that you will capture economically viable land, workers, tech, make vassal states, get to feudalism fast, be able to make trebs and strong combat units.

building your economy can be the focus when your war against your neighbors is wrapping up and you have enough units to expand in a different direction when they capitulate.

Then your borders extend to your former neighbor's borders. That's when your new border cities can be where you make your defensive stand, and your core provinces can focus on peacetime things like cottages and farms and specialists.

I recommend specialists because farms help you run mines and other hammer heavy tiles, and they can help you whip population, and they can help you grow back to maximum while you slowly convert the land to farms and cottages, or farms and hammers that you turn into gold or beakers.

If a city is very green or flood plain and is poor in hammers, it's worth it to early cottage it. But think of cottages as a long term thing. Specialists and farms can be turned into cottage cities later, and farms support wartime, and farms support specialists in peacetime.

Farms are better than cottages early game, except when it comes to research. Research stops being so important when your military is ultra powerful.

Cottages become more viable when you're certain that city will never see an enemy army in it. Then cottage the heck out of it.
 
Try this out: play on deity, and make the purpose of this playthrough practicing defense.

Prepare a particular border to be attacked. Get ready. then deliberately tick off or DOW on an empire that can attack from that direction.

Practice fighting them off, especially if they are a huge warlike empire.

It's good practice. Especially since you planned for this from turn 1 of the game.

It's fun. And it teaches you needed skills about making sure you are never surprised by a DOW.

Being ready for that war when you settle your first city means playing against that DOW from turn 1, and it means you're literally always ready.

Always be ready for that war. Always have a plan for it. Prepare for it happening. If it doesn't happen, great. You had peacetime long enough to build up an invasion army and tech up, I hope.

Know what to do with your forces once they reach critical mass and you want to attack. Have a target in mind that nobody likes and is near you. Or just settle for close to your capitol, and if you absorb them, you have even more defensible borders than before against the next target.
 
When they get cannons and stuff, or out-tech you, you can't defend well anymore, unless you keep tech parity. So don't just hope for an endless stalemate.

If you kill a few hundred of their units, you hopefully should have a great general medic, and several settled great generals pumping out city raider 3 trebuchets or something.

Very promoted artillery plus very promoted combat 3 or combat 4 stack of other units means not even the deity AI can defend against your attack.

They attack you and you're ready, just trains your future invasion force to be literally unstoppable unless they're a full era of technology ahead of you.

Frankly, with enough cannons nothing is safe.
 
When you reach the limit for how many cities you're going to make from your initial settler expansion peacefully:

Max out your army to the point where it is still at zero unit upkeep. Build as many cities as you can without it damaging your economy and slow down your research.

Those cities then support a larger freebie army. Slow build those units if you can, pop whip them if you need to.

Then, in the event of a probable invasion against you, or you want to invade somewhere else, chop forests and whip out more units than you can support while also doing research. Spam those out FAST.

Drop your science slider so you can support those units. Make an ABSURDLY large army.

Remember the units you lose stop costing you gold, and if you capture 6 more cities, you doubled the size of your empire, and those cities now support your large army. Meaning you are building an army you hope, by the end of the war, is more or less fully supported by the conquered territory. Maybe larger than that, even.

When you end the war, you should be back at zero upkeep per turn for your armies because you captured enough cities or lost enough units, or, you still have an army large enough to invade somewhere else and your new territory is now spamming gold to pay those troops, so you can turn your science slider back up.

Or keep the science slider at zero, and use scientists and libraries and building research to compensate, in your core provinces that are very well defended and will never be attacked by an enemy empire.

The ideal is returning to a peaceful, economic focus, while also having an army larger than your neighbor, when the war is over.

Balanced economy, no absurd upkeep, strong veteran units, lots more land, and the next neighboring empire wants no part of attacking you? That's good.

That's when you can decide if you're going to focus on further expansion, or defense and economy. Be ready to do both depending on the situation.
 
The area between your border city and your culture's border needs to be thought of as the kill zone.

Make sure you are capable of wreaking hellish havoc against any single tile within the kill zone.

Any tile that is difficult to attack is one you'd better defend with a fort and road up to it. A fort on a hill is a good place to snipe invaders from, especially if it is not directly adjacent to your border city, so you can pull back if things get dicey. They can capture a fort, it makes no difference to you. Capturing cities makes a difference.

There should be zero tiles between your border city and your culture border that you couldn't destroy 30 units if they were foolish enough to move there.

Even if it costs you a dozen catapults, make sure the 30 stack is wiped out. You can replace cats quickly, not cities.
 
Basically I just stopped worrying and learned to love the savescum. Random seed on reload is yer friend if you want a more relaxing game.
 
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible, civ4's appeal IS the perfectionism. With so much freedom to micro and fine-tune everything in the game, it's what makes the game special and worth playing. The enjoyment of civ4 comes from chasing perfection. It's why I've always thought civ4 is a horrible game to play casually, you need to be in a really specific mood and mindset to play it.

That said, my most enjoyable games are where something unexpected happens that ruins my perfect game and I have to figure out some way to salvage it. I had a Raging Barbarians game where I lost my first 2 warriors to a 3% and 0.9% barb fight on the same turn :lol: That absolutely warranted a restart/reload but I played on anyway and it ended up being a crazy and really fun game!
 
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible, civ4's appeal IS the perfectionism. With so much freedom to micro and fine-tune everything in the game, it's what makes the game special and worth playing. The enjoyment of civ4 comes from chasing perfection. It's why I've always thought civ4 is a horrible game to play casually, you need to be in a really specific mood and mindset to play it.

That said, my most enjoyable games are where something unexpected happens that ruins my perfect game and I have to figure out some way to salvage it. I had a Raging Barbarians game where I lost my first 2 warriors to a 3% and 0.9% barb fight on the same turn :lol: That absolutely warranted a restart/reload but I played on anyway and it ended up being a crazy and really fun game!
Honestly I disagree. I have been playing CIV since SMAC came out and newer experienced that sort of drive to perfection that the OP is describing.

I think it's down to how you approach the game more than anything. When I play CIV4 I just start the game up on my favorite settings and dive in without even considering any sort of long term strategy or goal. I don't even pick the victory condition I am going for 99% of the time. Hell I don't even really play to win as much as I just play to play.

So for me the fun is all in the minutia of the turn to turn stuff and what ever short term goal I have set for my self. You know like "conquer X" or "tech to Y". And if I fail those than I just pick something else and go for that.
 
I think the answer will have to do with the answer to the question, "why do you feel compelled to start over?" Is it being over-competitive? Is it wanting to be in control and the mistakes feeling like that control is slipping away? Is it the micro-frustration of the short-term failure winning out over the macro-frustration that is the repeated restarting taking the fun out of the game?

I'm more like PPQ_Purple, I've never been a perfectionist in Civ. But I haven't ever really been a perfectionist in real life, either. I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoy failure, but I've learned that I learn more quickly from failure than from success, and within the context of Civ, failing in certain goals leads to more longer-term challenge. Then again, I almost never play on Deity, so mistakes are rarely fatal. Playing on a very high difficulty, I would suspect, leads to more perfectionism.

I have known perfectionists in real life. In my experience, an effective way to help them de-perfectionize their life can be sharing stories or experiences of where someone intentionally made sub-optimal decisions, and the result was better than if they had aimed for perfection. Someone who publishes a paper that may not be perfect, but takes half the time of a perfect one and leads to someone else making a discovery that builds on that first paper, for example. Firaxis publishing Civ4 Vanilla and making money from it allows them to make the improvements in Warlords and Beyond the Sword, as another example.

There probably won't be as practical of results for your Civ playing. But one suggestion I might have is that sticking with a game and seeing it through is more likely to result in a "legendary" game that you remember in the future. If you restart a game at the first time something goes wrong, you'll forget about it within a week. Games where you have to overcome some adversity, and maybe even intentionally try something likely to be sub-optimal just to see how it works? I still remember the Civ3 game where I stuck with Egyptian War Chariots as long as possible just to see what would happen.
 
Understand that perfection is subjective, and you will drive yourself crazy or into depression by punishing your psyche with the phrase, "I could have done more." Even if you maximize every worker turn possible for the best score possible for the earliest date possible for your map's unique seed, you'll then be telling yourself that you did it too slowly. At the end of the day, it's a game, and the fun is solving the puzzles along the way (and clicking "NO, BURN BABY BURN!" when the AI dares to plant a garbage city that claims an otherwise good tile for your well-placed masterpiece next door).
 
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