Aw, been a while since someone's complimented me, thank you!

Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually... it clicked.

It isn't the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don't even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot... will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of 'well obviously i do this in this situation' decisions...

and yeah, then get slapped with 'nope, no workey'.

But... if you stick with it... just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.

You must empty your mind of false notions you didn't even realize you had, before you can begin to fill it with correct ones, haha.

Its funny you bring up stellaris... i spent like a month just utterly failing until that 'click' moment.

Then, a few months of 'i am actually decent at this' and then a few more months till 'actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses... and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball'.