What's a recent thing you learned or changed in your playstyle that improved your game?

[MutilationWave]

For me, it's packing a scout in every army commander. There's a sort of secret fifth slot for a civilian unit, or seventh slot if you're upgraded to six. Now I can deploy all my troops while retaining the maneuverability bonuses. Or I can pop up a lookout tower to see what the enemy has coming earlier, to identify a weak point in their line, a hidden healing unit, or an attack that I need to shift my troops to better repel. Also in modern they can be used as spotters for your artillery or aircraft.

Now if we could just stop having them lose all movement on entering zone of control. What's that all about anyway? I can accept them being affected by it, but I want to get right up in an enemy units grill and unload my troops from there.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

Placing a new settlement will often cause some hostile IP units to appear and attack.

 

[MutilationWave]

Placing a new settlement will often cause some hostile IP units to appear and attack.

Are you sure they're appearing? I thought the same, then I realized I had settled too close to a neutral IP. They became hostile and came right out of the fog to attack.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

Are you sure they're appearing? I thought the same, then I realized I had settled too close to a neutral IP. They became hostile and came right out of the fog to attack.

I think you are right, it just feels like they come out of nowhere.

 

[evonannoredars]

City-planning has become a lot more fun and less same-y once I started consciously 'specialising' cities.

I'll look for a good spot that has potential for great natural adjacencies for two kinds of buildings (eg an area with both winding mountains and coastlines), then prioritise maximising adjacencies and specialists for those tiles, sometimes not even bothering to build buildings for the third kind (in the case of my example, science/prod buildings). Harder to do initially when the specialist limit is capped at 1 in antiquity and is probably isn't improving my game strategy-wise, but it's more fun knowing that a city is a 'culture and gold' city.

I hope they someday implement an actual way of 'specialising' cities tho that has a presence on the world map, rather than through invisible stuff like resource allocations. Also am desperately waiting for being able to hover over the yields in the top-right to see a yields per settlement tooltip like in Civ 6, would make being able to compare settlement yields and recognise which are the best sources of which yield wayy easier.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

City-planning has become a lot more fun and less same-y once I started consciously 'specialising' cities.

Funnily enough I came to this realisation last night as well!

 

[vorlon_mi]

For me, it's packing a scout in every army commander. There's a sort of secret fifth slot for a civilian unit, or seventh slot if you're upgraded to six. Now I can deploy all my troops while retaining the maneuverability bonuses. Or I can pop up a lookout tower to see what the enemy has coming earlier, to identify a weak point in their line, a hidden healing unit, or an attack that I need to shift my troops to better repel. Also in modern they can be used as spotters for your artillery or aircraft.

Now if we could just stop having them lose all movement on entering zone of control. What's that all about anyway? I can accept them being affected by it, but I want to get right up in an enemy units grill and unload my troops from there.

Packing a scout! That also addresses the issue of the scout's fragility when wandering around alone.

Keeping it packed -- most of the time -- lets the commander keep its maneuverability bonus as you said, even when all of the combat troops are deployed. Brilliant!