Become a better Commander; understanding the Operational Level of War.

If you guys are interested in more strategic theory, I recommend learning about the O.O.D.A. Loop - Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It sounds common sense on the surface, but the person who can observe and react to rapidly changing events quicker than his opponent often has the advantage by "getting inside" the other person's decision making process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

You should also read these good articles on Centers of Gravity/Critical Vulnerabilities. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cog1.pdf
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cog2.pdf

Knowing what the enemy needs to sustain his combat capability and learning to focus your forces on "emptying" those needs is the essence of Centers of Gravity. Its much deeper than that but I think learning about this will help you become a better strategist/tactician.

Good point and what I was thinking about writing about next. A lot of current doctrine over the last couple of years has modified these two topics but on the whole they form the basis operations art and science.

Great post, and fantastic first post.

I do think it is very telling about the philosophical differences between games like TA and games like Starcraft where it doesn't really make sense to talk about abstract strategy with respect to Starcraft, but it is actually practical to apply abstract strategy to games like TA.

Given a sufficiently deep game, it stops being useful to always talk about specific circumstances because there are too many possible situations to address them on a case by case basis. Instead, strategy takes on a much deeper significance. The art of war, battle doctrine, and principles of strategy. Or Go proverbs. By contrast, in Starcraft the "strategy" is responding to a specific, highly-detailed build with a specific, highly-detailed build.

Simple to learn, multiple lifetimes to master is what makes a strategy game great. This kind of analysis of strong gameplay is vastly, vastly better than line-item build orders and single maneuver timings that get discussed to death in many other "strategy" games. Still, as awesome as this post is, it seems strongly aspirational to me. I think PA may have a ways to go before this kind of abstract strategy actually becomes highly practical, but I absolutely hope that it will.

This is really deep stuff, but theoretically, victory can be achieved mathematically. You should read about Tian Ji's Horse Racing. http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/mjjshu/ISR12.pdf

Another profound theory I found in a book called "Unrestricted Warfare" on the "rules of victory", the Golden number 0.618/Side-principle rule can be used to form an assymetrical or unbalanced relationship that in essence can equate to victory. The Tian Ji horse racing is one example how the Golden Number 0.618 (Golden Rule/Golden Ratio) can be applied to strategy. You can read about it in Chapter 6 on page 152 of the PDF version. I recommend reading the entire book, but if you would rather read about this particular point, then you should skip to page 152 and read from there: http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/18798685/37698448/name/Unrestricted Warfare .pdf

I think I read an article a while back that probably addresses your exact point: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131921/the_future_of_the_realtime_.php?print=1

Basically, RTS games as we know it center around tactics than broad strategy because, let's face it, tactics is the means to the overall strategic end, which is, for most RTS games, to eliminate your opponent through attrition, giving you hardly any other option to win other than to fight.

This is an interesting read if you get the chance.

Back to school, huh? Cool, cool.