Art of War

"Preemption is the essence of the Maneuver Theory."

-Robert Leonhard

Chess is said to be the foremost ancestor of any strategy game. A common aspect among most decent chess players is that they usually also excel in mathematics. You must have the ability not to think 2 or 3 moves ahead; but, 9 to 10. One might ask how another thinks so far ahead in such a match. Most normal people cannot do this. When one claims a mate in 10 moves, it is merely a guess judging from the strategic outlook. They have not calculated that far ahead, they have just taken the current situation, and accounted, on an overall level, the general location of his pieces that far ahead.

Usually, when a piece is captured, one might lose a positional advantage. Strategic chess and tactical chess are very different approaches to playing the game. Strategic players generally seek out a positional advantage, while tactical chess seeks to destroy the opponent's mass or warfighting capability (usually seeking out the queen). These tactical chess players are following the attrition theory, or as Robert Leonhard put in his book The Art of Maneuver, "Battle Calculus." When doing a long math problem, one sometimes gets caught up in rules and properties, that one forgets what the question is asking. The objective in chess is to subdue the opponent's king to the point, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the king would be captured within the next move. If the king is in check, then the king would have to move or have another piece block or parry the threat. The ideal place for all of the major pieces to be is at or near the center, where they can move, for the most part, unhindered, throughout the board.

So now that we know what our objective is, how do we execute an attack to be most effective? The problem with the attrition theorists' are the words: mass and destruction. Imagine two bulls fighting when attrition is heard. Collateral damage could be enough reason to state that neither would win. So how do you defeat a bull? Become an El Matador. Though mass and power greatly outweigh the 150 lb. man's chances, the El Matador has speed and intelligence. Since the bull does not always lose, one can make the argument that "Battle Calculus" does play a part in war, even if only a small part. Should it not affect war on any level, then Adolph Hitler might have been more successful in World War II.

Preemption

How was Hitler so successful given only a limited number of troops? He understood a concept that was first written by Sun Tzu call preemption. Preemption is the overcoming of an opponent before the opponent has a chance to react. Does it really matter how good one's armored division is if the war is over before they have a chance to attack? One of the reasons that Nazi-Germany fell was because they did not defend well.

This is why staying on the offensive can be helpful. You can cause your opponent to make mismatches based of the fact that your opponent does not want the intended target to be acquired. Although an attrition-like outcome of wear-'em-out, you were able to gain, in the "Battle Calculus" spectrum, small, tactical victories, but from a strategic standpoint, now the opponent has transited into a defense attitude (and hopefully won't transits back too quickly). Staying on the offensive will be covered in greater detail later.

Many football coaches claim that defense wins a game. The objective in football is to gain more points than the opposing team. Here is a chart of purely-based offensive or defensive teams and the outcome:

How do you determine points in war? If you are a fighter pilot, do you simply put another piece of black tape on the side of your plane displaying the number of fighters you shot down? An attritionist would. The goal of the war is to render the center of balance (i.e. the King) ineffective or destroyed.

Dislocation

Preemption is not always the available option. By definition, preemption works because the opponent has not armed. Naturally, the next best strategy is dislocation. Dislocation is the action of removing the enemy from the decisive point. A military may have 10 F-117s, but if they are all flying on the other side of the earth, they are deemed useless.

Dislocating an enemy is extremely hard in a perfect intelligence situation. The enemy would be less likely to venture out after bait, knowing what going on. This is why Dislocation is commonly overlooked in strategy games that have perfect intelligence or have the ability to turn off "Fog of War" and "Day and Night." And in some cases, players do turn these options off because it causes lag. Thus, we leave dislocation to game developers to create weapons with different utilizations. When David fought Goliath, David never intended to attack with his sword or spear, instead he used his sling, giving him range over his more powerful opponent, causing his strength to be irrelevant.

Disruption

"He who knows the name of the commander his is fighting, has the advantage."

-Chinese military proverb

Disruption is the process that attacks an opponent at their center of gravity. One's center of gravity is their critical venerability or the one, possibly many, target(s) that the opponent cannot afford to lose. The main purpose of disruption is to avoid a physical brawl of strength vs. strength. At the Battle of Ilipa around 206 b.c., Publius Cornelius Scipio had woken his troops early, and marched to face his opponents, the Carthaginians. Having their opponents staring them down, the Carthaginians were forced to arm their front lines. At this point, Scipio simply waited for the hunger of his un-fed, early-awaken opponents to catch up with them.

Thus far, the majority of the explination of these theories have included mass, weapons, and speed. Disruption can include physical aspects of war, but can also be utilized in some of the most important aspects: psychology. This intangible can be more effective than any weapon a commander has in his/her arsenal.

Take for instance the stereotypical schoolyard bully. Big and bad, he struts around school taking others' lunch money. The strategic thinking of the schoolyard bully is to keep others on the defensive by taking a purely aggressive attitude towards others. Usually this starts by a single fight won early in the bully's career that ended up humiliating the opponent. The bully gains a reputation for portraying extremely little mercy on his (and in some cases, even her) opponent. The element of fear is the primary contributing factor to the bully's victories.

Martial arts tournaments have to opposite type of war psychology. First, the announcer near the beginning of the event (usually during the opening ceremonies, which by the way takes up more time than the tournament itself) basically states that "we're all frends." Eveyone gets psyched up before the tournament only to get there to have their ego crashed by the "friendly" rules that govern the tournament, which is often times, exaggerated by the announcer. Then, while waiting by the ring in which one fights, an opponent decides to approach you and make "friendly" conversation. "Where ya from...what's your favorite technique...what do you think of this guy (one fighting)?" Personally, I despise anyone who tries these tactics at a martial arts tournament. I have found that the question "Could it take any longer?" is usually a genuine question and not for the benefit of the questioner. The attempt to make others believe that everyone at the tournament are friends and them "saying" that they're friends with you is a ploy to make you think twice about attacking at full force.

Problems with current strategy/war gaming

One problem with current strategy gaming is the absence of the intangables of war. Morale, which plays a great factor in war, is often demoted to merely affecting civilians. Some games do, however, have loyality factors embedded into a soldier in which the soldier defects if his loyality drops below a certain point. This still does not fully emphasize the benefits of morale. When a soldier, unit, platoon, battalion, or any size force holds their comander with high respect, they should move faster, hit harder, and, if possible, possess greater artifical intelligence than those that are lower.

When on the unit or squadron level, some games do not allow quick commands regarding formations and agressiveness levels. Often times bottlenecks of various sizes pose problems for some types of formations. One in particular, is too narrow for wedge formation, but wider than what would be typically a collumn formation to pass. Programmable formations would be a great improvement for this problem. Aggressiveness is similar because some formations are designed for fire, and others for maneuver. A simple click of the mouse to switch a selected group from aggressive to passive would be an added plus.

Hot keys are great, but typing to communicate is not. Programmers should focus on integrating a voice chat program along with typing chat. Since voice chat would contribute to lag, typing messages would remain for the moments when time is not sensitive. Even a programable quick response would be beneficial. Beta testing for quick responses would be very significant.

Guild improvements were used by a game but abandoned by a more recent version. Workers, researchers, miners, etc. that were assigned to work would improve their skill over time and become more productive as long as they remained at their current job. Soldiers would also improve during battle.

Although not a current problem, weapons (like ICBM's) that attack any point on a map can provide too much an advantage. The key, in my opinion, is that these weapons do not provide fire, but just fire support.

Most importantly, games should become equipped with cheat detectors. One cheat that evades the benefit of being detectable can ruin a multiplayer game. If any improvements, this should be the primary goal of a programmer. Even rumors of a cheat can cause contraversy among the players.

(to be continued)

Works Consulted