Being good at "strategy"

a good strategy game is about being able to manipulate, and outsmart your opponent to achive victory with minimal loss to your forces.

Imo intelligence is the ability to put information in your head and recall it when you need it, basically the ability to learn.
So strategic intelligence is really nothing but the ability to adapt to new situations on the battlefield.

I would consider tactics to be specific combat maneuvers, and not what they are trying to achieve. Flanking and the like.

A tactician could know a variety of combat maneuvers, but not exactly when to best apply them.

Say for instance, a strategist and a tactician(using these definitions) go up against each other.

The strategist moves to take the high ground so that they have the high ground advantage, he decides to go along a certain path because it's better for some reason.
He is making a plan to achieve an advantageous outcome.

The tactician uses a pincer formation because it will hit the enemy from multiple flanks and he is in a position to do so.
He is performing a combat maneuver that gives him an advantage.

Obviously both are important.

Another way of thinking about strategy versus tactics. A strategist loses wars where a tactician loses battles. Both of these cannot be done in a vacuum or you will fail.

Sorry I have to disagree. Taking the high ground is a tactic. A tactician must know when to apply which combat maneuver, that's what makes him/her a tactician.

I would say that the high ground is a goal, and the act of taking it is a tactic.

Goal management being strategy, execution being tactics.

So for the strategist the focus is on the goal(high ground) and the tactician it is on how to best do it(pincer).
Both have base tactics(taking the ground) and strategy(I want those dudes dead).

I'd say that taking the high ground might not necessarily be a strategic decision. The decision, in other words the strategic decision, was to lead a battle in that place, so now you have to use tactics to win it.

Though if taking the high ground would be the winning condition, so to say, then it could be a strategic decision and not so much a tactic anymore.

It's a complicated topic.

I would look at taking the high ground as a decision between prioritizing the high ground and another point of interest. At least that was the intent behind my post.

Maximizing range and vision over... say... gathering resources or pressing directly into a base.

Let's just take PA for an example:

Say, that you want to invade a planet, but it has already been colonized by someone else.
Now you plan ahead and think about the way you want to do it. You grab an asteroid, build halleys on it, build unit cannons, and armies and send it into the planet's orbit. You start shooting your units.
Now this part is strategy.

Everything that follows is tactics. For example from which angle you attack, where you land your units, which buildings you prioritize, movement patterns, taking high ground advantage, and so on.

Strategy is the plan and the goal, tactics are the execution.

How does one become good at a 100% strategic game?
1. Play a game
Did you win? if yes go back to step one, if not move on.
2. review game and make note of how and why they won.
3. Add their strategy or improve yours.
4. go back to step 1.

do this over and over again until you can not get passed step 1 or until you get bored and move on to another game.

Absolutely

This is a hypothetical question, so I'll try to give a hypothetical answer. There is no such thing as a 100% strategic game. A strategy game is going to have decisions made by the player as an important factor. If it doesnt have this, then its not a good strategy game. In a RTS game you are to be making decisions in real time and taking actions that should have a reasonable impact on how the game develops. If the game is more about how many times you click in a minute which will result in you having more income and a larger army, and that determines if you win or lose most often, then it's not a good strategy game. If you can play the game at a pace that is manageable on the other hand, then you have time to make decisions and choices that are strategic, in place of just spamming units and energy for example. APM is the most significant factor in determining whether you are going to be making strategic and tactical choices or if you are just having to click and build as fast as possible to win the game. In PA, the APM requirement is too high at the moment for a person to do much more than build and spam as fast as possible, if that person wants to be a high level competitive player. That is why people like myself, want the game to shift to requiring less APM and to allow time for more strategy and tactics. It will make the game more fun and much more complex. So its how fast can you click VS i can click fast enough and now im making choices about what my army, fabs, ect are doing. A good RTS(real time strategy) has manageable APM. If it doesn't, then it's just more of a RTS(real time spam). The game is starting to shift to lower APM requirements with the latest patches, but it still needs lower APM requirements to be a good RTS compared to the others available.

Strategy in this case is noticing the high ground before the battle and saying, "that is going to be the key point in any fight near it. Let's take the hill first/second/never/run away"

A tactic would be saying, "Hey boss! let's split our armies, surround the hill, and then hold it against the enemy!"

There is a 100% strategy game out there. It's called Auralux. It is a cool game, free for Android and Apple devices, and gets stale after about 3-4 hours of play because it doesn't get any harder. Some of the earlier levels deserved some serious thought before beginning, which was a pleasant surprise.

I do agree that a *good* RTS should reward larger, overarching decisions (strategy) compared to microing your units directly to the enemy base. I have heard quite a few people say they do not consider Starcraft a true RTS for this reason - they consider it more an RTT - Real Time Tactics.

Alternatively, you could add a Step 0:

Read tons of strategy books

OR

Watch tons of videos of other's strategies.

If taking the hill is one of the objectives to winning that battle, then yes it is a strategic decision to take it.

But it doesn't necessarily have to be an objective. It could also be something that you decided in the midst of battle. I think it kinda depends whether you planned it before the battle, or if you decided to do it while you were already in the battle. Strategy takes place before the battle, tactics when you're in the battle. I think.

For me , not the term Strategy, but RTS is:
based on Strat, like if you turtle, you rush, you try a snipe... not thing like: if I micro this bot like a Boss I win the game, or I micro my entire army and the same thing happens.
have a balance between Micro and Macro, Units and Eco... but yet the thing of the Strategy...

can I improve this
1.Play a Game

2. Did you win?
yes, see what you made wrong and improve!
NO, see what you made wrong and improve!

No, there is no confusion in terminology thanks. When chess players talk about there being no strategy, what they mean is that there is a perfect response to a position, and as a result of that there is no strategy.

I used the word strategy as a catch-all word to describe decision making in the game of Chess.

The fact of the matter is that the Chess grandmasters know the perfect response to the given position.

There is no strategy in Chess because there is no decision. There is one best move, and the alternatives aren't actually that great. At the grandmaster level, chess is memorised openings and mathematical solutions.

Strategy is decision making in the absence of perfect information. There is no strategy in chess, because you have perfect information.

At the amateur level, yes you might not to be able to identify what your opponents move was all about. However, at the Grandmaster level, you know what your opponents move is, how you should best respond, and what your opponent should respond to that.

Chess can be considered a strategy game where your actual strategy (in a game with two equally skilled players) is almost meaningless compared to your knowledge of the games mechanics.

In my book, a GOOD strategy game is one where there is no set way to win - that is, your CHOICES, not your KNOWLEDGE, decide the battle. There are only a few games truly like this out there, and they all have almost no mechanical knowledge. Not an elegant solution, to be sure, but an effective one.

It also makes the game INCREDIBLY shallow after a few hours.

So a balance is needed. Hopefully, Uber can find that balance.

Chess gm's don't have perfect calculation ability lol, do you know anything about high level chess?