[BTS] (Rant) Reloading will sneak up on you...

[6K Man]

Due to an elbow injury, I have been forced to switch my mouse to the left hand. And man, has my Civ game suffered.

Long ago, I broke myself (mostly) of my reloading habit. I even wrote a treatise on the subject . But the misclicks that have resulted from using the mouse left handed have been painful. Three days ago, I abandoned a game in which I lost small stacks to misclicks at least three times (sidenote: left clicking selects a unit, right clicking send the selected unit (or stack ) to the tile the mouse is over). The final straw was a misclick that uncovered my mixed siege stack (catapults, trebuchets and bombards), allowing a smaller stack of Vietnamese Knights to destroy 11 out of 13 of them. The siege was on its way to defend a city, and my inability to do collateral damage to the Vietnamese attacking stack caused the loss of my remaining defenders (20+ units…) aaaaaaaand… ragequit. I can’t remember the last time I lost a game militarily in the Renaissance era.

So, new game started. Nice start. Win Music (free GA!). I’ll use him to trigger a Golden Age for the civic switch at Civil Service, thinks I.

My GP farm, after pumping out an initial GS (Academy), spits out another GA at 6% chances (due to Artist point pollution from the National Epic). Fine, thinks I. I’ll use him for my second Golden Age, maybe around Liberalism.

During the Civil Service Golden Age, I get another GA from my GP farm. I don’t even know how low the odds were. I was building the Parthenon in the GP farm, but I don’t think that was complete yet. Odds had to be less than 3%. Fine, says I through gritted teeth. I’ll use him to partially bulb Nationalism… that’ll help me along the road to the Taj.

Several turns later… yet another GA. Odds were 7%. RELOAD.

Two turns later, after opening borders with Joao, I move into his territory to explore. Except it’s not his territory, it’s the other green AI, Boudica. Who has the biggest army in the world. And this is where my left hand misclicks again, and boom… we’re at war. Ragequit.

I’m going to reload that game tonight…

Just had to vent. Thanks.

 

[ArchGhost]

Go ahead and vent, it makes you feel better!

I've had bouts with fighting against reloading or WB stuff the whole time since I've picked up this game. The game is very complex adding another layer of difficulty even on top of how difficult it already is, and the worst part when still learning to play or playing up against your limits is it's quite time consuming. I've been rage-quitting certain events like 60 turns in crossmap DoWs against me instead of Worst Enemy/Border-mates on Immortal (i still only win like 50-60% of the time even when doing good, bad starts/luck makes things so much worse ) and I don't think THAT is much better lol, but it's slightly less time consuming.

I don't really have a feel for this community's sensitivities on the subject, but personally, I think if you view playing a game as a learning experience reloading isn't all bad. So long as you're aware what you are changing and how you could have done better such that you can use said knowledge to surpass the same challenge when presented again, I think it can be helpful in way. Playing games like Baldur's Gate series, various FPS game campaigns, etc taught me that RNG luck can be particularly brutal and sometimes simply trying again can have more an impact than changing the approach, if the stars realign, so maybe that's why I feel that way. In a strategy game such as this, you can at least glean what can work and what doesn't work as well from the experience.

 

[duckstab]

My own view is that anything goes in single player, as long as you don't dishonestly claim to have achieved something you haven't.

Personally, I don't reload in most cases but I will in the event of a truly disastrous mis-click such as you describe.

 

[Quintillus]

For me, misclicks are the case where I don't have a problem with reloads. Minor ones, sent a guy off the road by mistake, I'll roll with. But the really major ones, like the accidental-super-low-odds stack-attack, I'm okay with reloading. It was never a strategic decision, not even a subconscious one. It wasn't bad luck. It was a hand-eye coordination error in a game that isn't about that sort of thing.

Good treatise, though. I'm also curious - it sounds like you still have the mouse in right-handed settings? That's how I do it at work... use the mouse with my left hand, but leave it in right-handed settings in the control panel. Whereas at home I use a mouse with my right hand, in right-handed configuration.

 

[2popbulb]

Why is reloading a save game so terrible? It's not like you are using wb or editing game files. If you misclick or forget to do something before ending turn or stupid combat loss happens(riflemen cannot defeat tanks in the open nor can war elephant shoot down helicopter) why not reload?
In one of my games I forgot to switch from researching Liberalism to something else 1t before finishing research and reloaded autosave. And it can happen that I send units where I don't want them to go.

 

[rah]

As long as you're not competing, I have no problem with ANYTHING>
It's a game where enjoyment is the ultimate goal. How you attain it, is your own business.

For me, it's usually the mis-click or (and yeah the liberalism one) I even went back in one game when i forgot a civics switch (for 20 turns)

When I am testing a concept I may do multiple ones but I rarely finish those games,

When I first started playing it was sometimes hard to resist the temptation but then after 100s of MP games, the habit is broken.

 

[6K Man]

I usually don’t reload misclicks because it’s tedious to replay the same turns over again (on top of the temptation to utilize knowledge gained during the initial playthrough of turns). Moreover, in the middle to late game, it can take 30 seconds for a 2+MB save to load. But in the early game – oops, I accidentally walked my settler next to a barbarian that I could see? Reload. That’s a game changing mistake, there’s not many moves to replay, and the game will load quickly at 2600BC.

What was frustrating about my situation was that each individual unit or three lost due to misclicking (except the last one) was immaterial on its own. But taken together, I lost about 6-7 units to misclicks before my siege stack was wiped out. 6-7 units is the difference between capturing a city and having to wait until the next turn to do it. And after I let all the little misclick incidents go by without reloading, I was annoyed enough to say “**** it” when the siege stack was left uncovered. And when that loss turned out to be very material 2 turns later… restart.

The next game… I was mentally prepared to reload. I wouldn’t normally reload an unwanted Great Person, but I was in that mindset. I didn’t reload in the last game when I should have; I’ll make up for that for reloading now without a good reason to! The Boudica incident was a justifiable reload (had I been in a better frame of mind, lol)

 

[unas876]

I just think about whether it's worth my time to reload. If the mistake is big enough to warrant making the effort to replay since the last autosave (how do you set your game to autosave every turn again btw? with BUG mod only) then I might do it if it was something lame like forgetting something crucial that I had planned but just didn't remember or a misclick.

 

[s.bernbaum]

(how do you set your game to autosave every turn again btw? with BUG mod only)

Autosaves are part of the game, no BUG mod or any other mod needed. Open the file "CivilizationIV.ini" located in your CIV documents folder (not the game application folder) using your favorite text editor. Find the following lines and set how often you want the game to autosave and how many autosaves to keep. It will replace the older ones with newer ones once you reach the number of saves. Then save the file. I use "1" for how often, which means every turn and "10" for how many. I mainly use them when the game crashes due to memory problems, not much of a problem for me now with my newer computer, and occasionally due to a mis-click.

; The maximum number of autosaves kept in the directory before being deleted.
MaxAutoSaves = 10

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 1