How do you stop yourself from being impatient and ruining your campaign/s?

[MachopPower69]

I recently have noticed a pattern where I get too impatient and it leads to me either quitting or using commands because I can't relax. I think I blame this from the guides on Youtube where they show you what to do but don't really show the breaks, just the important moments so that is probably my reasoning of being too quick.

How do you stop yourself and not go too aggressive and not get too impatient for expansion and ruining your games?

 

[UthyrPendragon]

Slow and steady catch the monkey.

 

[Nostalgium]

The boring answer is "experience". Once you've burned yourself on over-aggression enough times, you eventually learn how hard you can go without messing up.

 

[joos]

It's quite hard sometimes, I know. But I have found a few ways to deal with it.

Try to have multiple objectives across multiple regions. Not all countries are suited for this play style, but when you are playing a major, try to spread your interests in different regions. That way, you don't have to sit on your hands and get impatient as you wait for whatever coalition or timer to countdown. You can just shift your attention to another part of the world as things cool down.

Try not to recreate favourite borders immediately. The biggest issue I face is this. When I play as France, say, I get impatient to recreate Napoleanic France and end up cheesing or cheating. This is a tough one to break out of.

Use mods. There are some great mods out there that can make gameplay fun even when you are in the intermediate stages of your goal. For instance, Extended Mission Tree mod gives a near-exhaustive list of missions to many countries. Just going down them is enough to get you powerful while making the journey also seem exciting.

A bit of min-maxing is good. When you play with the numbers in the game, you will discover joy in even the minor changes. That doesn't mean micro or being the typical min-maxer. But deriving fun out of increasing/decreasing numbers can be a great way to stay calm.

Play as a secondary power. When you play as a major, you start with great power that you can quickly use and abuse, resulting in either boredom or some sort of status quo that's not fun. Instead, choose secondary powers who have to rely on web of alliances and be able to take advantage of situations as they arise. German and Italian minors are great for this kind of game play.

Play a nation you don't know anything about. Too often, we pick nations we are deeply familiar with, and try to recreate their history, and get annoyed when things don't go exactly as planned. Playing as England and watching Castile colonize Canada has made me rage-quit several times, even though I know I should be able to get those provinces from them in a colonial war easily. It's just the unhistoricity of it that bothers me. Solution: play someone whose history you don't know.

 

[Jespoke]

My main things are:

• Make the goals for my campaigns things that are not simply "Become as big/strong as possible"
• When starting/ending wars, i don't focus on keeping my coalition on a level i can technically beat, but on a level that won't be a massive slog to beat.
• Set explicit rules for each campaign that ban me from doing things that are optimal but unfun.
• I've learned to accept that sitting at max manpower because I'm waiting for AE or vice versa is normal, i shouldn't let it bother me like it used to.

 

[necro84]

Play as a secondary power. When you play as a major, you start with great power that you can quickly use and abuse, resulting in either boredom or some sort of status quo that's not fun. Instead, choose secondary powers who have to rely on web of alliances and be able to take advantage of situations as they arise. German and Italian minors are great for this kind of game play.

it depends, for me German minors are the most boring - I need to wait for right moment instead of creating it myself and AE in the HRE is too big for rapid expansion. I have more fun playing nation like Odoyev than Hesse or one of the Bavarian nations. Do something and wait for 5 years is not for me

 

[MatthewP]

I’ll add this one: plan the next war rather than overextending on the current one.

Also more generally pay attention to the type of game you actually enjoy and learn how to create it for yourself.

 

[MachopPower69]

I’ll add this one: plan the next war rather than overextending on the current one.

Also more generally pay attention to the type of game you actually enjoy and learn how to create it for yourself.

That was what ended my campaign in my Venice game: A plan went well but out of nowhere the Ottomans gave Albania their whole army, 2x the size of mine. And the game really hasn't wanted me to get technologically advanced in military compared to my neighbours because I have been getting bad mil mana rulers in the past few games.

 

[Volbound]

From personal experience, sometimes I just leave the game when I am in a bad spot and come back and everything seems to change. You could always try that.

I tend to make these mistakes more in MP games than SP games because SP games, I will pause and look at the facts prior to making major decision. I cannot do that in MP games.

 

[MachopPower69]

From personal experience, sometimes I just leave the game when I am in a bad spot and come back and everything seems to change. You could always try that.

I tend to make these mistakes more in MP games than SP games because SP games, I will pause and look at the facts prior to making major decision. I cannot do that in MP games.

Sometimes I make mistakes on the second session because all my plans are cleared after a night sleep. I usually play at night then play it the next day.

 

[Volbound]

Sometimes I make mistakes on the second session because all my plans are cleared after a night sleep. I usually play at night then play it the next day.

I could see that too. I think the engine's RGS restarts sometimes when you restart the game. You could back and things just seem different.

 

[MachopPower69]

I could see that too. I think the engine's RGS restarts sometimes when you restart the game. You could back and things just seem different.

Yeah, the restart is how people cheese the AE/coalition thing.

 

[Republic of Mercury]

I rely on a simple behavioural algorithm

if(goingToDoThat)
    then
    {
        don't
    }