#Strategy and Tactics

[almackey]

From Jomini to Dennis Hart Mahan: The Evolution of Trench Warfare and the American Civil War

This article by Edward Hagerman is from Civil War History, Vol. XIII, No. 3, September 1967, pp. 197-220. “The transition from fluid strategic and tactical movement in the early campaigns of Napoleon to the trench warfare of the American Civil War began in the period of the Empire and the Restoration. During the period of transition and theory, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the wars of…

[brainrotcharacters]

Wade's undiagnosed adhd (switching between dual wielding swords, guns, and daggers) is only ever matched by Logan's undiagnosed autism (noticing weak spots in his opponents and going 100% momentum + force on his attacks)

@wadesknife this for u bb

[linderosse]

@knowledgebear Thank you!!! And I’m so glad to see more TriStrat fans in here!!!

Triangle Strategy is an amazing game, folks. If you’re into tactical RPGs at all, I’d highly recommend it.

Anyways, here’s a lil’ crossover art for all of you Zelda/tactical RPG folks: Flora (BotW/TotK Zelda) and Frederica Aesfrost had a swell time discussing various worlds, histories, and timelines. Turns out the Zelda series in particular has a lot of time shenanigans going on (wow, who would have guessed 😆)

I’m actually also playing a random-army, deathless, NG++ challenge run of TriStrat right now! If you’re interested, stop by and join me! It’s been a blast so far!!

Info Post

[jonasgoonface]

maybe consider violence.

[apas-95]

I do think it's funny when anarchists try to intimate that the communism Marxists ultimately intend to build is actually the same as the smallholder economy anarchists desire, because they just hear the word 'stateless' and assume (as libertarians are wont to do) that due to Human Nature, society without a state would naturally result in 'everyone's a small business owner' communalism

[nomsfaultau]

I wonder what Techno's response would be if Tommy won in the pit. Because he's a pretty 'might makes right' dude so I'm trying to figure out if he'd just shrug and be like 'ok I was in the wrong and Tommy got his revenge so it's all fair and square' (while being secretly frazzeled and quadruple down about training harder and stockpiling max everything because Tommy??? Tommy beat him???).

Unless he doesn't see his life for Tubbo's as a fair trade, and thinks along the lines of Tommy's life taken in retribution. Because Techno is super pro revenge, and it could be a 'hey! I didn't have a choice killing Tubbo! That's not fair!' reaction. Techno pretty consistently wants the last word on violence, cataclysmically so, but at the very least will leave it there as is instead of extracting payment over and over and over. So I think there's a real possibility of him scheming up revenge, stockpiling like crazy, and waiting for the proper moment so it doesn't look like he's going back on his word.

Cause like. Techno does say 'win or lose, it stays in the pit'. But he's also fully going in intending to win. He's skewing the odds in his favor with strategic saturation boosts and is very confident in his abilities. When he offers Tommy an out, it's because he wants this to be a choice to fight and then drop it no hard feelings, not because Techno thinks he'll lose.

But if he did. If he did, and was humiliated in front of everyone. If his combat abilities were called into question because he lost to Tommy. If Technoblade 'never dies' lost a life. Well. I think he'd be put in a tailspin. He'd be analyzing every single second in that pit, over and over, to figure out what went wrong. Playing in his head on repeat as his strategist's mind turns against him.

Because as much as Techno tries to twist W--'s egging and goading and escalating into a de-ecalatory measure, Tommy is definitely still holding hard feelings after the pit. And I think Techno would, too, as much as he tries to insist it stays in the pit.

[greentrickster]

Oh pitiful Ares, born to be hated

For daring to contrast Athena's pretty tactics

With war's ugly truth.

Born to be mocked

For expressing that injuries bring pain

Rather than raise a mask of stoicism.

Born to be hated.

Born to be mocked.

Is it any wonder, then, that he was drawn to her?

She, who was born his opposite?

Born to be cherished.

Born to be desired.

Monstrous Aphrodite.

She who alone looked upon his ugly truth

With longing returned

And with the knowledge that, between them,

All might be fair.

[n64retro]

Ike from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (Intelligent Systems, Nintendo, 2005) for Nintendo Gamecube.

[the-daily-dreamer]

I swear at this point team black just looks for reasons to hate team green because tell me why every take I see from the previous episode about aemond is that he’s pathetic and a loser for turning around when he sees a bunch of huge dragons ready to jump him? That he only attacks when it’s an “unfair” fight (sneak attacks).

Like how is that a bad thing?? That’s smart. That’s called not going into an unwinnable fight (a la Rhaenys). That’s called fighting to your advantage. That’s called being good in battle.

At this point team green characters could sit in a room breathing and team black would find a way to complain about them or make fun of them.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In the same bed, but not on the same page

[First] Prev <–->Next

[brainrotcharacters]

just giggled kicked my feet twirled my hair again

[dimonds456]

Headcanon: Papyrus believes that everyone has the capacity for good and change because Sans also believes that. He's the one who taught him that, and Papyrus ran with it to its extreme.

[whumpypepsigal]

The Night Agent s01e04: “Glad you finally got some sleep.”

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[sprintingowl]

Radish Knights - Launches In October!

Radish Knights, my feature length tabletop roleplaying tactics game about tiny vegetable knights defending their kingdoms, is launching on October 2nd 2024!

You pick a vegetable, choose a knightly order, and engage in tiny chess-board-sized combats against bandits, kudzu dragons, fallen orders, and an empire of corn.

The game is entirely human made, with design and writing by me and art by Jonas Wittmann (who did the excellent illustrations in my chicken-thieving fantasy game Mendicant.)

I'm an extremely small indie designer, so I rely a lot on word of mouth in order to crowdfund my games. I would love it if you spread the word about this one, and if you personally want to be notified when it launches, hit the Notify Me button on the other side of the link.

There's no specific goodies for being first, but you do get first pick of the limited backer levels where you can force me to add new vegetables, knightly orders, weapons, or monsters to the game.