I’m not very good.

This shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve noted before that I don’t play many games often enough to actually excel at them. But I usually fail even against standard newbies who just have a better sense of the ebb and flow of a RTS. Part of it is my inability or unwillingness to stick to a standard build order. In CnC 3 I’m trying (factory + outpost, power plant + refinery, refinery + refinery, + barracks + power plant…and then I get lost) but it never seems to work out as well as I’d planned. I guess I’ll need to watch some replays of my defeats.

One problem is my mousy nature. Not personality wise, but my heavy reliance on the mouse pointer instead of hotkeys. Someone as old as me should be able to remember hotkeys; I still recall many of the key inputs for F-19 Stealth Fighter. But no, it’s the mouse for me and this slows me down a little.

That said, I really enjoy CnC3 in multiplayer in spite of EA’s execrable lobby interface. As I noted in my review, the three factions are both very similar and very different at the same time, making the transition from one to another relatively smooth but keeping the experience relatively fresh. I have a hard time keying on more than one opponent at a time, especially if they have different factions, since what works against one might not work so well against another.

I have a clear tendency to focus on one enemy at a time, meaning that I always end up leaving a back door open. I often have soft underbellies all over the place. It would blame it on my obessive/compulsive issues if I had any. It’s most likely just plain old tunnel vision.

In the meantime, I’ve been invited into a Civ 4 PBEM game, which should be fun since, a) Civ 4 is still the best game on my hard drive, and (b) I haven’t played a multiplayer Civ game in over six months. The group has chosen the Chinese Unification scenario from Warlords, probably one of the most interesting scenarios in the lot. It could be hard to get those unification votes from human opponents, but it does make it more worthwhile to cultivate any powers left beyond human control.

I’ll let you know if I’m any better at that.