Prioritize your bottlenecks! Developing quickly and harmoniously is a key aspect of strong play. Good or poor development has a compounding effect that ripples through the entire game. A bottleneck, by its very nature, creates a cascade of hampered progression and lost tempo. Identifying and addressing current and expected bottlenecks should be one of your top priorities in any game. Take moments while playing to stop and ask yourself the identifying question “What am I waiting on?” and actionable followup “How can I speed that up?”
Analyst Reman’s Paradox knows well the importance of finding and solving the holdups. His video evaluation of military idea groups in EUIV explicitly bases his assessment in how effectively each option works to improve bottlenecks to empire development:
You as a player should be mindful of your personal strengths and weaknesses when identifying a bottleneck to your play. Reman shares the key insight that a newer EUIV player is more likely to be limited by combat and so will especially benefit spending their idea group slots on military ideas early and often. A veteran, better able to find easy wars and prosecute them efficiently, should deprioritize military ideas in favor of ones that indirectly generate opportunities for efficient wars from a strong position:
In the rest of the video, Reman breaks each military idea group into its specifics and discusses the conditions to which each is best suited. As Reman’s work is so densely on-target, I think it best to let him speak for himself: