It's OK to reload when...

snarzberry

Emperor
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May 28, 2010
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...the Governor switches citizens on you and starves one population from your capital.

...the way finder changes it's mind and sends one of your units to certain death after lying to you.

...you miss out on an important wonder because your GE spawned on the only tile across a river from you capital and had to burn a turn crossing it.

...you forget about archery and get it from a research agreement that was supposed to give you steel.

...you don't have four resources around your capital.
 
Or ... None of the above. ;)
If you are playing at such a difficulty level that 'bleep' can't happen, you're playing at too high a level. :D
Once you slide to the dark side of reloading, when do you NOT reload?

1) never seen it happen; 2) God BLESS incompetent officers! 3) so save the GE for your NEXT wonder (across the river: that sux, but I've lost wonders by 1-4 turns several times); 4) God BLESS forgetful players! 5) I often have only 2-3 by my cap, but there are always more in the general vicinity (but I'm only playing at Prince diff).

If there's a turn that I make a major decision point (e.g., go for UN -OR- Space victory when Gandhi has the whole other continent -- I lost by 4 turns in that one), I'll save the game with an appropriate file name so I can try an alternative route.
... Not that I've ever gone back and tried an alternate. I just wait a few days and start a new game (large continents/epic speed).
 
Well, I confess - when I burn a Great Engineer on a wonder that's been around awhile, I fortify everyone and fast-forward to make sure someone isn't going to get there one turn before I do.

(New wonders, ie, ones that come available when you're leading the tech tree, are "safe". "Old" wonders, like, "wtf, nobody's built the Porcelain Tower yet, what the hell" - not so much. :) )
 
i wouldn't reload when you don't have 4 resources around your capital, you'd have more luck restarting.
 
i wouldn't reload when you don't have 4 resources around your capital, you'd have more luck restarting.

Don't you guys find a river more important than a slew of resources? Man, those +1 golds add up. My current game, nothing, nada, not even a damp spot. Missing it.

I'll take a river running through a hilly region. (Plus, who knows, may be iron/coal/alum/uran in them thar hills!)
 
Or ... None of the above. ;)
If you are playing at such a difficulty level that 'bleep' can't happen, you're playing at too high a level. :D
Once you slide to the dark side of reloading, when do you NOT reload?

For me (personal choice of course here) it's when something about the way I interface with the game causes me significant losses - of units, efficiency, etc. TMIT's perennial favorite is telling a siege unit to attack, only to have it slide up next to and cuddle up with the unit you just told it to shell. (Of course that one can be solved by just using the bombard key, so it's not a great example.) But in general, as a turn-based game where reaction speed is not an issue, the game should be about my strategic capacities vs. the AI's. When the interface causes me to do something I didn't intend, and as a result my play suffers, I think it's completely reasonable to go back and put it in its place.

For some things, like the capital being starved by an incompetent governor, while it could be seen as my fault, it's more the fault of the programming being... silly sometimes. I occasionally reload those, mostly because I don't enjoy playing tedious micro games, and when the allegedly decent governor AI fails so utterly at its task of automating the simpler functions, I don't see that as my own failing per se.
 
Whenever I want to. It's my game. I play it how I choose and choose based on minimizing frustration while maintaining fun. Really couldn't care less if that makes me less of a civ player in anyone's eyes.

Reasons I've reloaded and will continue to do so:
-When I have a hostile civ near me with iron, and I have none (well, I don't reload, I just quit altogether).
-When I'm DoW'd on and not ready (I reload and try to see if I can bribe someone else to DoW on them first, or at least prepare my defenses better)
-When I've made a risky gamble that did not pay off (e.g., heavy losses trying to take a city because the RNG was not on my side).
 
... you line up Acoustics with Legalism as your next social policy on the same turn and the museums don't pop, even though they should.

... an AI outbids you on a city-state and you drop to -60 :c5influence: with them even though you're not at war with said AI.

(Basically I only consider reloading if I encounter a valid bug, but rerolling the map is another story: If I'm not feeling it, I'm not playing it:p)
 
when i'm using the great artist and instead of culture bomb I end up clicking build monument instead

Yeah, things like that are pretty much the only reason I'll reload. It has to be user error on my part (or, I suppose, an unwinnable war. It makes more sense to try and make it winnable than lose and start all the way over). If it's just random chance (like losing CR when going for a cultural victory), I curse a lot and move on.
 
...ever you feel like it.

+1

Unless you're in a competition with other people, any reason you like is a suitable reason to reload the game.

Governor starving and UI lying about pathing are particularly grating though. They're not a question of chance or actual user mistakes (no spouting garbage like attempting to use an in-game control option is a mistake), but rather atrocious game implementation. How hard is it to get the game to do what it is showing you it will do?! That these things can and almost certainly do factor into competitive formats is a disgrace.

I can list games from the 1990's that showed a unit's pathing and then never, ever did something as wonky and terrible as ignoring the displayed pathing and getting itself into a certain death position. Why was it so hard in 2010?

Civ has always had bad governors, so at least that's consistent (actually unit pathing is too as it sucked chunks in IV...). Even so, starving a city by switching tiles AFTER end-turn? That one was pretty foul. I understand it might be hard to make an intelligent governor, but there are extremely stupid things that human governors do where AI governors do not...suggesting that firaxis made the human governors idiotic to the point of being unusable on purpose. -1 for that design decision. It's not like the game should play for you, but at the same time the governor should be able to handle a reasonable approximation of generalized order bias w/o imploding. Working unimproved tiles over improved ones (both IV and V) and starving human cities and lying about it before doing so (V) are not the kinds of things one thinks of when they think of a game with good controls...
 
Remember the "Ironman" setting on SMAC?

Real men play Ironman--no reloads.

That said, I'm not (usually) a true man. A CiV game is such an investment of time that if something goes terribly wrong, I'm generally not above backing up ten turns and shooting for a different outcome. Although in my current game, I don't think I've done that--but maybe only because when I've lost wonders, it's been by such a wide margin that there was nothing I could do.
 
... when my graphics glitch, ie. all the time.
Not exactly a reload. I just save the game and exit to windows.

On topic, a civ city governor has never been reliable. It's a civ tradition. I've never liked the governor in III, IV or V.
 
In all seriousness, if I play the game through without reloading and win then that is when I feel like I've really WON. If I reload then from that point on the edge has been kind of taken out of the game and I don't really feel like I'm playing to win, I'm just experimenting to see what I should have done. There are a couple of things that would cause me to reload and to not feel like the 'edge' has been taken out of the game, so to speak, and that would be the governor starvation and the inaccurate pathfinder.

Maybe throw disastrous miss-clicks into the equation as well...
 
... After clicking in the wrong place and the events are game-changing, like joining in a war where you intended to not get involved but mis-clicked.

Reloading is fine, but I frown upon it when it is done to mask weak playing.
 
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