🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <44769e3c$1...@clear.net.nz>, marsh...@SPAMparadise.net.nz 
says...
> pigdos wrote:
> > For the mentally challenged I'll give at least one example of strategy. When 
> > the Imperial Japanese Navy decided to attack both the Aleutian islands and 
> > Midway it was a strategic decision, not a tactical one. Tactics can only be 
> > discussed after such strategic decisions have been made (if you don't know 
> > where you're going to fight how can you make tactical decisions on how to do 
> > it). The tactics of how to carry out this strategic decision were left up to 
> > the admirals who commanded the various task forces or task groups because 
> > they would actually BE there. Nimitz didn't second guess the tactical 
> > decisions of Halsey, but Halsey didn't dictate the strategy the entire US 
> > Navy would pursue in the Pacific either. Other strategic decisions might be 
> > to bomb war production facilities as opposed to concentration camps --  
> > either could have been done, but it isn't a tactical decision.
> > 
> Ok, where does the difference between strategy and tactics stop? While I 
> agree that it was a strategic move, the carrier fleet still had to 
> decide the strategy on how they were going to take the Islands.

Just because there is no bright line doesn't mean there is no 
distinction.  Yes, you can say that stratergy is what you get when you 
take an overall view of a lot of tactics, and there can be more than 
two levels in a hierarchy, in which the strategy of one level becomes 
the tactics of the next higher level.

Typically in games, however, the levels change character as you move up 
and down the hierarchy, and you can group them into broadly 
'strategic' or 'tactical'.  In Chess, for example, you count material 
and positional heuristics at the strategic level, whereas at the 
tactical level you calculate sequences of moves.  In HOMM, there's a 
distinction between moving your heroes around collecting resources and 
avoiding or hunting the enemy, and fighting a battle against an enemy 
hero.  There are two separate AIs for this, and everyone knows which is 
strategic and which is tactical.

> To me this states that the words mean pretty much the same thing (aka 
> they are synonyms), so RTT pretty much means RTS (and RTS pretty much 
> means RTT).

I would say RTT would be the correct name for typical RTS games (some 
would suggest RSI!).  Not because there's a bright line - sure, you do 
some strategic things like deciding whether to build a base - but 
because the tactics dominates and the strategy isn't very complex and 
doesn't consume much time.  The fact is that the turn-based games, more 
often or not, have a strong high-level strategic component - and the 
RTS games, by and large, don't.

There is another kind of 'RTS' game which is not really a strategy or a 
tactical game but a puzzle disguised as one, i.e. you make several 
attempts to work out the correct plan to defeat a level, but you 
couldn't expect even a brilliant player to have a chance of defeating 
it first time when new to the scenario, except by pure luck.

- Gerry Quinn