I don’t want to expand myself endlessly on such a complex and multi-faced theme, but I think we could find out a lot of useful tips on the best strategists in the history of the world. For this first part I am going to focus my attention in these ones:

Miyamoto Musashi

The basic idea I want to remark from this awesome sword master is the idea recorded on his “Book of Five Rings”

Everything in this book goes around the tactician, commander if you may. As the creator of the strategy, Musashi compares him to a carpenter. All crafter that wants to success on his profession, must know perfectly well his own tools. The more he knows the tools, the more valuable pieces will come out of his workhouse.

If you pretend to lead a team, or a full alliance, you have to know the roles of every single class present on the battlefield. The more you know them, the better you will be able to direct them. Even more, they are not only classes, but people. Each individual will act on his own personal experiences and knowledge on his class. Know them well, and you will have half of the battle won. This is why not everyone is cut to be a leader, knowledge of your class makes you a good warrior, knowledge of every single detail of every single class of every single person makes you a good leader.

Musashi applies 5 circles in the battlefield, but in our case 4 would be applicable. I guess you imagine which ones them would be. Healing, Tanking, Dps, and Leading. And yes, I apply leading as a class apart from the events on the battle itself. The director/s of the fight should be focusing on the whole battle, and not on the bloody ranger that is nuking them.

Vom Kriege

The most interesting idea coming from this Prussian general is the idea of “Fog of War”

I guess most of you are familiar with this term, but we tend to forget that in MMOs we do have a fog of war too. The idea is pretty simple, you don’t see them, they don’t see you. We lived that situation today in the inner abyss. Our enemies stayed at a certain distance from us, letting us relax before gathering together and attacking us. Many times they succeeded just because we didn’t spot them on time, killing one or two people in the back. We have to understand this fog. As I see it, there are 4 levels of fog in the game.

1. Visual distance. Basically visual contact, and remember we think on 3D now.

2. Map distance. Hard to organise anything based on the minimap or the general map, due to the lack of altitude. If you are going to base a tactical decision on a minimap warning, be sure to check the altitude 2 or 3 times before. Would not be the first time that you find yourself alone when you are supposed to be surrounded by allies, that are actually 300 meters bellow you. Every position reference should be accompanied by at least an altitude message.

3. Radar distance. The ones of you familiar with enemy radar, know that this is a very useful warning. But the only problem is that you don’t have a clear direction of where the enemy is coming from. But it’s a good heads-up. Some of you know as well that each time that the game engine loads an attackable pc, it lags for a fraction of a second, this occurs even before the radar ping.

4. Awareness distance.  This is the tricky one. The one which gives you the advantage in combat. There are blind spots in your awareness in-game. The most clear of them is behind you. You don’t see, don’t detect enemies behind you till they are backstabbing you. But the most efficient one, is actually up. You cannot see enemies just on top of you, you cannot direct the camera to see them, you cannot target them without struggling with the camera. An attack from the top of a group can give the automatic advantage to a smaller group. And this is the place you want to be if you are a ranged DPS.

Sun Tzu

The idea of Adaptation is the one I want to mark on this Chinese general. Every single combat you will face will be different. If you root yourself on the patterns of the fights you will lose eventually. No one has a definite battle plan to win all the skirmishes. That’s why there is a whole sea of strategy books. The more you try to find patterns for all the possibilities that you will find, the more you will be close to the failure. Is just a matter of time that someone, somewhere will think a way of breaking that patterns. If you are the one to break it, you will win.

The ones that played Warhammer will remember this situations. Endless warbands roaming a map conquering all, objectives, forts, then fortresses, then cities. It was that way till someone found out how to conquer forts in small groups. Breaking the pattern and making the warbands turn around, re-conquer everything and look desperately for the small sneaky group that was pissing them off.

Patterns are boring, monotone. If you let the groups rot in stabilised patterns they will turn lazy. Everybody remembers the follow/afk issue on destruction during our days on WAR. Keep a fluid strategy, be imaginative, try new ways of surprising the enemy, of making yourself strong in other situations, and the battle will be a challenge everyday. And the people will love every single day in the battlefield. Sun Tzu used the water as an example of this. Water is the most powerful element in the world, yet is fluid, it changes, it adapts to a bottle and runs free in the oceans, it transforms the mountains and turns the fire in mud. Be like the water, and you will succeed.

Andrew Wiggins (Ender)

I know this one is a science fiction character, but his creator (Orson Scott Card) made a great work on making him one of the most brilliant strategists in space 3D battles.

The idea is very simple. The 3D space is a complex concept for us humans. We are not used to think in 3 dimensions, because we live trapped by the gravity of a planet. For us up and down are secondary troubles. Fighting on a real 3D scenario makes your basic knowledge of strategy useless for a start. You can keep thinking like you normally do and fail or you can adapt the properties of this scenario on your advantage.

We are starting to see what kind of situations you can find. The first and most important is the confusion. When a large group of members start flying around, there is a sense of chaos, like something is not where it should be. This leads to panic. The floor is a good position for defence and a good point of start, but staying on ground will turn you into a prey, like a pack of rabbits for a falcon. In order to avoid the confusion of the group flight, train is necessary.

Machiavelli’s book, “The Art of War” it’s a long extend and boring compendium of dialogs about the management of an army, but we can take a small part of it to point out an important concept in battle. The division of large groups of combatants in smaller, more useful phalanxes. 

Large groups moving are devastating in combat, but difficult to command. Splitting the action between smaller self-sufficient groups, makes it easier to react and adapt to the battle. In our case it would be necessary that the groups inside an alliance had a certain degree of self control and management. This implies too a new concept inside the warband, there wouldn’t be only 1 leader commanding, but a group of them under the lead of the main director. If you are going to lead an attack, its comfortable to know that each decision you take is going to be filtered by at least 4 thinking minds. Let’s make an example of this. If you want to direct a rear attack on a pack of enemies, you can order one of your squads to flank them, if that squad is directed by someone you trust, you’ll just need one order and the squad will act independently. You would loose a precious time explaining the whole movement to the 6 warriors.

For this end, you need people that are used to play together on each squad. So placing them together during all the battle and adjusting properly the groups before starting is crucial. This squads need to act as one, and control their positions in battle. Is useless to be in a great group, if the members are splitted all over the map.