What was your biggest mistake(s)?

[alex15]

1)Attacking a neighbour recklessly too early
12)Not entirely quitting Civ4 after 26 attempts. See under my user name! Why am I here godammit!?

Its not mistake, if some one plays Civ4 too often instead of quiting he should take rest from civ for some time, but not quiting forever.

My biggest mistakes before reading articles on this site and playing Nobles Club (some of these mistakes I still do):
11) Waiting too long to start conquering

Its not really mistake because its making game harder and harder means more fun to play.
Ofcourse conquering earlier is better, but avoiding that is one ways to make game harder to play.

 

[Lennier]

My biggest mistakes before reading articles on this site and playing Nobles Club (some of these mistakes I still do):

1) Not using the whip
2) Wonder spamming
3) Not building enough military units
4) Not building enough workers
5) Building spamming
6) Not specialising cities (I still don't do this enough but I do now focus the National Wonders and Buildings a lot better)
7) Leaving attacking armies in conquered cities instead of freeing them by replacing with defensive units
8) Neglecting to protect/escorting my workers and settlers in the BC era
9) Playing up into the early hours despite having a toddler who could wake me really early and work next day
10) Not immediately changing to representation after building the Pyramids, often going many turns until I realise.
11) Waiting too long to start conquering

My recurring mistakes tend to be 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 , and 10 (several times ).

 

[ZeekLTK]

I made a big mistake in a game I started recently.

Whenever I get a leader who has a chance to found an early religion, I always go for Hindu, because the AI goes for Buddhist first, so I can ALWAYS get Hindu.

However, as Saladin I decided "let's try to beat the AI to BOTH Buddhist and Hindu!"

AI founds Buddhist 1 turn before me. Ugh.

Then, different AI founds Hindu like 2-3 turns before I get to it. Arrrrggg...

All this time spent researching those, and I didn't even get ANY. And then I'm behind on techs I need like Bronze Working, etc. Shouldn't have done it, but I thought it might be nice to control the religions early on for once.

 

[rfcfanatic]

Using the whip for the sake of using the whip is the greatest mistake I make most of the time.

 

[M3dge]

Looks like a lot of consensus on :-
1) Not enough workers (although I often find I am putting workers to sleep before railroad and RP - I think that puts me off)
2) Overbuilding. I STILL do this - I can't remember ever entering the latter stages without bank, lib, uni and powered factory in every city apart from the GPF (and I am just about working out how to set this up). I know it's wrong, but I still do it...
3) Too little defence. Because I am overbuilding....

However, I can add:-

4) Completely ignoring naval until I have steel and combusion, other than caravels for exploration and great merchants. The mid game ships just seem so rubbish I put them off...then have no response when a stack of ten galleons hit me.

5) building sub-optimal cities just to block my neighbour's expansion. Sometimes this makes sense (eg at a pinch point on the map) but usually it's vanity - this is MY land! I now realise it's better to found in the right place, let the AI settle if he wishes then take those cities by force later on.

6) procrastinating on a DoW because it will be so much easier with the next tech up the tree...ignoring that during the delay, the AI is also advancing.

7) Ignoring spies. I often go many games without building one. Then I try it...and see the benefits...but somehow it slips off my radar.

8) Failing to use specialists properly. Although I had some great responses to a request for help on this last week, so I am trying to improve

 

[Olson]

Not trying CivIV until this year.

 

[ZeekLTK]

I made another mistake in a different game. 8 civ game, I started on an island/continent with just one other civ. I dunno how, but I got going down the path towards Music, so I thought "okay, let's do it - rush and get the Great Artist and then go back for other techs". I get to Music... no great artist. Someone, somewhere else, beat me to it. Now I have all these techs I don't even want (Drama, Music, etc.) and I didn't even get the Great Artist.

 

[MensPulchra]

Misclicking my army to a sensible tiles where it could be easily destroyed. Happened to me once. It was funny.

 

[noto2]

Oh geez, where to begin...

Not getting a GP farm up because I'm "busy" doing stuff and then it's half way through the game and I've generated maybe 1 GP....

plopping cities down right on my neighbour's border and defending them with a single warrior, then spending dozens of turns building lovely temples, libraries, granaries in them and then getting outraged when my neighbour waltzes in with 3 axemen and takes all my border cities...

sitting there building away, waiting until I get to the next era before building military because if I build it now it will just "go obsolete soon" and then I finally get to the next era and can start building macemen, so I build 1 maceman and suddenly Ghengis invades with 20 axes, 20 swords, 20 chariots...

sending an entire army of maces and pikes and trebs into enemy territory, feeling good knowing that my maces are protected from knights, and then watching my whole army die to crossbows...

 

[Choeimok]

From a (strategic) resourceless and awfully cramped position, winning a war against an equally resourceless cramped warmonger with Catapults doing the work and Archers as a mop-up unit - and then thinking I could pull that off again against the peaceful third civ on the continent with Copper, Horse, Iron, more land, better land and 3 times my production that was still far from Feudalism and therefore surely not a defensive threat. That power is just Baracks and Archers anyway and even if some is real units: that attack courage should be zero, right? Take some cities with my glorious veteran Archers until then, make peace and then outtech, outproduce and clean up with Mace/Treb or Rifles, that was the not very well-thought plan. One little overconfident declaration, one lost game. Not that I would have stood a chance with a peaceful approach, I had one capital with poor food, one with mostly coast and 3 or 4 more marginal brown production cities. That against a much greener 12 city empire...

 

[whitelaughter]

Well, still make the mistake of overbuilding - because that's what I find fun in the game. I'd rather remain a poor player having fun than a skilled player being bored (and frankly the combat side of Civ bores me).

But the most amusing mistake was when out of curiosity I went into the worldbuilder and gave the barbarians ICBMs to see what they would do with them.....

 

[Lennier]

I take it they went the terrorist route? Tell Tachywaxon; I remember he said in another thread that barbs couldn't use ICBMs because the code said the couldn't move them.

I also overbuild infrasturcture. I like my cities to end up being someplace I'd like to live, not a size-6 (or less) hovel with 100's of turns of whip unhappiness that has been spending the whole game whipping out units for conquest.

 

[Chingis]

Ah, yes, I remember my VERY first game. I chose Babylonia out of not knowing what I was doing (No offense to Babylonia fans out there, I just sorta picked the first guy I saw) and I had built something like 40-50 cities before 0 AD. (I played a lot of Civ 3 before this...) ahhh... The perils of not knowing what the f*ck you're doing...

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Buying Civ4, Warlords and Beyond the Sword and wasting countless numbers hours playing both challenging and enjoyable games.

One of my "real" biggest mistakes is forgetting to convert from a popular state religion to the state religion I want The Apostolic Palace just before completing it.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[enKage]

to click Launch instead of OK on spaceship screen, when only 1 SS casing was ready...

 

[LincolnOfRome]

I tend to take too many low probability gambles like using the Oracle to get the Machinery tech.

 

[The LittleOne]

1) Not understanding the game
2) Having no idea what I'm doing

 

[xploring]

Settling too far away early on to grab land/resources, rather than settling to establish good cities close by

Refusal to settle away from fresh water, or settle without food in first ring

Forgetting to think ahead, effect of building a wonder, what to do after building improvements/infrastructures

Feeling overwhelmed with decisions, empire management

Reloading for mistakes, oversight

 

[Lennier]

Sorry for the necro, but I've done a doozy: in my current game, I built the Heroic Epic in my GP Farm and my National Epic in a high city. :crazy eye:

Spoiler :

Luckily, I could go back and reload from shortly before I loaded up the wrong epic in my GP farm.

 

[M3dge]

No, thanks for resurrecting this, I am sure others would like to update the lists! I enjoyed looking back on them, and also seeing which of my own royal screw ups I have managed to correct...a couple...but I can add some extras:-

- Running out of cash. Before currency this is a real problem and I keep running up against it, especially if a war goes too slowly (as it often does in ancient era).
- Leaving empty territory - because I was trying not to settle poor land for the hell of it - and getting settled from the sea by an aggressive AI looking for an invasion base. duh.