Long term vs Short term decks

[Asateo]

Today, I've been playing some games which lasted long and had almost the same run and ending.
Be it on water or on Land, I get ahead in the game, destroy part of the other player's base. He/she manages to push back and gets an advantage in late game because of the deck he/she has.

I usually use my standard deck. Unless it's water or some decks I have for specific opponent civs.

On tournament decks it's usually units that are stressed, but now having lost a couple of games vs ppl with long term/development/eco decks, I'm starting to doubt this.

How do you guys choose for a long term/ short term deck? And is it so that unit decks are the best?


Edit: Added the last match of this series. If anyone can tell me where I went wrong, I would be grateful.

[HUMMAN]

I think it is not because your openent had long game deck but you did not use your short term advantage to win. However as the maps goes larger and carries more reasources, it favors boom decks more. Still at our level playstyle matters more, try to improve.

[pecelot]

If that part of your gameplay fails, remember to check opponents' decks just at the beginning of a match to adjust your own approach. I was caught out with that lately, too, and I realised too late. If your enemies have long-term-focused decks, they certainly miss some cards necessary in earlier portions of the game, which in turn you can abuse with pressure, a rush in general or a timing push.

[lordraphael]

decks are kinda overrated. I used to have tons of decks. I had so many that i needed to pause the game to find the right deck. Nowadays i pretty much play with 2 maybe 3 decks. 1 land deck 1 water deck and one water deck with improved warships and its enough. In a tourney you dont really need premade decks either, you can adjust your std deck once you know your opponents civ, for example vs ports i might take refrigeration and the gold upgrade into my deck while vs otto i would take in as many unit shipments as possible and also CM.
My point is having 2 std decks is pretty much enough in 95 % of all games.

[deleted_user0]

2-3 decks is indeed usually enough. most games, if you're not playing vs an extremely equally well matched opponent, in fact you can play with a single deck. however, you sometimes some mus or maps or opponents require a special playstyle, so a special deck. only necessary if you play it often ofcourse, but still there is nothing against having more decks.

my rule of thumb is to have no more than 7, because 7 is what I can see without scrolling down.

[Kaiserklein]

Yeah tbh on tad with 25 cards you can pretty much have everything you need with 1 or 2 decks on land... For some civs 1 deck is enough, for example germany or france usually don't really need variations. For ATP civs for example, you can obviously make a deck with ATP and a deck without. Or with civs like aztec/iro with a lot of colonial unit shipments, you can do an "all in" deck with all units, and a greedier one.
Then yeah you can adapt for tourney when you really try hard, like add cards like 700f/5 uhlans/5 dops in deck and remove stuff like 2 sw/1000w if you're germany vs otto, etc.

Btw I'm not an india player, but I'm pretty sure you need the 9 zambs card in your deck

[WickedCossack]

Different decks become more/less viable as the players skill level changes.

What is a 7 skirm shipment to a player that is floating 50 skirms worth of resources at 10 minutes?

At the top level unit shipments are so crucial to control the pace of the game, the map, resources, create timings etc You get an immediate return by using those units to do something (whatever that is.) There's no immediate return at a lower level, often it takes 30 seconds to even find where the rally point was and collect your units before idling them for the next 2 minutes. All while having an insane amount of resources in the bank.

Hence this is why you see conscripts/privates have full on treaty decks and as each rank passes the players slowly add more shipments that have a higher immediate return on your investment, such as crates & units.

I'd recommend to stick with a high level deck and grow into it as you become a better player rather than taking a deck suited to your level.

I saw the game and the start was mostly good until you hit fortress. It looked like you were trying to put together an attack/timing with your multiple unit shipments but it came together minutes after it could've hit and the build really fell apart there (talking about the 12min mark I think, I don't remember exactly?). A lot of your army was idle and resources were in the bank. That had potential to end the game with your deck but the macro was off a little. Like most RTS things it's more a mechanical issue than anything else, his raid distracted you and took at least a minute off your push, macro another minute, idle army was another minute. At which point as I said earlier unit shipments begin to lose value. Acquire more APMs'.