The Ultimate Battle Turning Unit

[mosedavid]

Depending on the case its beating a rock with a 50% bigger rock.

i recomend you read the Tao te Ching and Art of war if you havent already. Thats not to be patronising by the way. There is always a way to win the AI with whatever you've got. Against human opponents online it may be that you need powerful units.

Take hannibal at Canne, he didnt have any battle winning troops: he had a few pikemen, a lot of spanish medium troops and cavalry better than his opponent. He won the battle by his use of tactics over his adversary. Another general would have used the army another way and would have surley lost the battle. The romans had that 50% bigger rock and still lost.

[antisocialmunky]

I forget what game theory strategy class it is but its what happens in a symmetrical game where one player adopts a strategy that can only be countered by the use of the same strategy so far as resources can support it.

For Example: Plant eating dinosaurs got bigger during the Late-Jurassic/Cretateous so nothing could eat them but predators got larger so they could eat them. However, after a certain point those large dinosaurs couldn't catch the smaller dinosaurs. So yeah, big rock beats big rock but not small rock because it gets stuck in a crack.

I'm not advocating the use of escalation as a solution for everything. But sometimes, you have to play that game until you find out how to negate it. That's why only idiots engage modern western style armies in set piece battles anymore. Since the use of a big rock against small rock doesn't do much to the small rock but instead does damage around small rock because its inefficient. Sure you could flatten on side of the big rock to smash everything but it still smashes everything and is inefficient.

The best use of your resources is to always use jsut enough for what you want, not more, not less. That's why the Romans got pwned so badly at Carnae because they risked everything(very low risk mind you) and lost everything.