I also learned that economy was more important than tactics when it came to strategy.
I played a game Utopia, which you guys might remember, across a decade. My Kingdom played with a heavy tactical focus and had a bit of a Spartan-type society - if you were weak in my Kingdom, you were dead. We eventually became very successful playing in a way that many described as dishonourable (ironic, since we typically scored highly in the "Honor" charts), because we relied heavily on "black ops" and had alliances backing us. We had a strict policy of "if you attack into our wars, our alliance will mess your Kingdom up". I believe our policy was something like "Hit into our war, our alliance will attack your province until we take 5 times the amount of land" - which got people really anxious. One age, we got "gang banged" as they called it, we recorded all the names who attacked us, and we spent weeks retaliating on every single province we recorded to the list. While we didn't see incredible success in the charts, we occasionally hit the top 50, and were happy with that because even the top 5 Kingdoms in the game feared us (and for good reason, we took the #1 Kingdom down to about #30 one age, killing their Monarch in the process). We embraced the "violent alcoholic warrior" roleplaying, until one of our members, who was an accountant in her thirties, taught us about Excel...
...and we became civilized.
She taught us about spreadsheeting, and those who didn't have Excel used alternate spreadsheet freeware programs. All of the Kingdom leadership got onboard, and we shifted focus to economy. We had spreadsheets which had many pages of calculations. I think the first age we rolled this out we'd already rebranded, and were hitting top 5, I think maybe #2 in land and Networth. Then the cell phones kicked in, and we'd be talking/texting, and all in all we ended up ranking #1 in land and Networth across a few years. People assumed we scripted, traded, and multi-accounted, but we did none of those things - it was all Excel spreadsheeting and figuring out the optimal moves in any given situation.
Funny enough, all that time I wasted in Utopia had a more profoundly positive impact on my professional life than University in the early 2000s did. And the benefits last to this day, and probably for the next couple of decades at least.
