Played my first (and last, for awhile) team game with Tann and some RUs. I have always stayed strictly in the 1on1 realm because of hardware limitations; I'm running below Minimum System Requirements so playing this game has always been kinda dicey. But I recently upgraded some of my specs and so I thought I'd give a team game a try. And Tann so nice to invite me in - how could I refuse?

• 450 MHz processor -> below spec!
• 16 MB video card -> recently upgraded to 128 MB
• 128 M of RAM -> recently upgraded to 256 M

The video card enabled me to go from a normal 4 FPS when playing 1on1 to 15-20 FPS. So, I've been wondering how my 5-year old machine would do in team games. NOT TOO WELL.

Tann was generous enough to say it was due to me getting the "bad draw" of Russians against his Mongols. But that's just him being nice again. Fact is, I lost. Looking over the game, there were several contributing factors:

• My FPS was reduced to about 4 FPS after about the 8th minute. Screen lag made any activity that required clicking on the map virtually impossible to do quickly and accurately
• There are a LOT more rares in team games. Instead of the normal 2-4, there were over a dozen accessible rares. Both Tann and his partner had a LOT of rares. Tann had 12 to my 2 (my RU partner also had 2). Rares alone accounted for way more than the actual econ disparity. 10 rares is at least a +200 econ advantage, and even if you can't get the cap that much higher, it makes for more efficient production (merchants generally being cheaper than the alternative) not to mention the nice bonuses all those rares provide. The takeaway is, I was doing fine economically with Russians on an intrinsic basis, but failed to take advantage of the rares. So it wasn't the Russian's fault, it was my fault.
• Tann has 1400 in ruin bonus. I'll have to watch his scouting technique more closely. He claims this was all on level 2 science. Harrumph!
• I failed to micromanage my army properly. Partly this was due to the lag, making any military movement painful to perform, but mostly it was due to poor planning on my part. I didn't manage to get any scouts into my army (despite clicking the production box several times and even upgrading them) and when I did attack it ended up being piecemeal and my forces got decimated. Even after losing my main army, I had difficulty forming another army, because the lag caused my way points to be scattered all over - mostly in the middle of his army.

Micro has never been my strong suit in any of the games I have played; I usually win by better strategy or macromanagement. Here, I just got runned over.I'll definitely need to improve my army tactics for the future. I'll post the game later today.

On the plus side, I'm going to be building a new system. My wish list is at NewEgg.com.

UPDATE: Here's the game.
posted by Tim at 6:35 AM