by agentcom on Thu Apr 25, 2013 2:23 am
Great advice from everyone here. My addition would be this: Once you make a big mistake, stop and walk away or spin around in your chair or something. I find that my most common and also most frustrating big F ups come back-to-back. It usually goes something like (1) "Oh crap, I didn't mean to hit that territ" (2) "Well screw this and screw CC" (3) <clicks End Assaults> (4) "Oh !%#$% !#$$%!@ !!@#$^^&#$!!! I forgot to use the other stack on the other other side of the screen (4) <goes into blind rage> (5) <presses End Reinforcements> (6) Realizes Step 5 was probably another mistake (7) <contemplates relative merits of throwing computer against wall or drinking heavily> (8) decides on the latter (9) screw ups continue for the rest of the night.
If you're like me, you realize that the initial mistake screws up your reasoning and forces later mistakes out of haste, lack of care, or whatever and it would be best to just step away after the first mistake and come back in 5 to see if there's any way to salvage it. But if you're like me, that will never happen, so this sequence unfolds on somewhat regular basis.
Fortunately for me, it only happens a few times a year, but that is because I can at least follow the advice of a couple earlier posters of mapping out your move in advance. I wish I had one of my pieces of paper laying around in which I had planned an elaborate elimination strategy, but I'll sometimes take up the entirety of a sheet of letter paper writing down attack paths, odds calculations and contingency plans in a sort of flow chart-esque diagram. So for me planning ahead helps to reduce a lot of mistakes.
Also, in the sequence of events above, you can replace Step 1 with instances of really bad dice or some other anomaly and the result can be the same ... (1) "&#$#$#$% dice!! (2) "I can't win this!" (3) <end-assaults-end-reinforcements-can't-hit-the-e-key-fast-enough> (4) "Oh wait, I could've still won" (5) Steps 7-9 above.