Thoughts on "strategy" and "tactics"

Periodically the subject of "strategy and tactics" comes up on BGG. I roll these ideas around in my head (I hope the rattling doesn't bother anyone...much). They describe kinds of planning.

At the most basic level, everyone agrees that tactics are at a "smaller scale" than strategy. In the military "tactical" considerations refer to small numbers of troops, and "strategic" considerations refer to large numbers of troops. My rough rule of thumb for wargames is that tactical games include line-of-sight, and strategic games include supply lines. Many euros offer multiple "paths to victory," and these can be considered strategic choices; while implementing your strategy, you will make numerous smaller, "tactical" decisions. In Princes of Florence, you might pursue a building strategy, and you will have to decide on individual turns how much to pay for various items. You choice of strategy will inform your tactical decisions. To win with a building strategy, you probably need 3 builders, and you just pay whatever the price required.

Chess and go have a rich literature on planning. Chess books describe things like knight forks (where a single knight move attacks simultaneously attacks two pieces) as tactics, and things like connected passed pawns are strategic considerations. Chess books also call these features positional advantages, and at the higher chess levels the game is all about these. Books on chess "strategy" focus heavily on positional play, assuming the player has already mastered tactics. After all, controlling an empty file doesn't do you much good if you drop your queen to a knight fork.

The examples of chess and go show there is another idea floating around here. Sometimes a particular game state or position has a meaning that transcends move-by-move (aka tactical) analysis. It seems this "higher meaning" is related somehow to "strategy," but perhaps not.

Another example from chess. Kasparov was defeated Deeper Blue, and he later commented on one of his games in Time. He described the end game where Deeper Blue made a brilliant pawn sacrifice that shattered Kasparov's position. Kasparov knew he was in trouble, but he didn't see any forcing lines, so he accepted the sacrifice and took the pawn. Deeper Blue went on to win the game. In post-mortem, it turned out the game tree had shrunk to the point that DB was able to compute all possible moves to the end of the game. To DB, it wasn't a sacrifice at all; DB knew it was a game winning move.

It seems strategy and tactics are closely related to intelligence and the ways that humans and computers "think."

Interesting stuff, IMO.

Notes from the Underground

In no particular order:

• Michael has clinched the AL pennant ... I split with the A's in todays set, and I believe he split or swept Scott yesterday. I'm not sure about the NL (the Mets have to play their week 7 and 8 series ... ). The Dominitable Nick Green wins the 'Golden Whiff' award, going 0-9 with 8 Ks. And as you would expect, with the Yankees out of contention today (Michael had to get swept for my series to matter) A-Rod had a great series.
  
• For those of you who played in Monday's Phoenicia game, I've posed the first turn as a problem and gotten quite a bit of responses (including from the designer). I've also got a two strategy articles. I definitely want to play with variable starts from now on.
  
• Michael has been pushing for 7 Ages, and I agree that it's been too long.
• Had a nice bout of Shadowfist tonight. If anyone wants to learn let me know and I'll bring a few simple decks to monday night. Or just show up on any Tuesday at DLair (by 6pm ish) and someone will teach you.

Leave your latest game related links in the comments.

Yspahan strategy revisited.

During todays game session I got to try out the heavy caravan strategy in a face to face setting. It is clearly not as powerful as against the computer (pushing 130 average there now), but it still worked somewhat. I do have some ideas about counterstrategies that aren't of the "can't beat 'em join em" variety.

1. Pretty much you want to buy the caravanserai even if you don't want to go heavy caravans. At least some of the time you will be shipping your dudes to interfere with the caravan player and the reward is much sweeter if its coming with a free card (that you can also use to interfere with them: see below).

2. Regardless of what else is going on, if someone is trying to go heavy caravans, prioritizing the corner barrel district is very important in the second and third week.

3. Almost as good is blocking the corners of the vase and sack district if he somehow grabs the barrel district location. (When blocking the sack district corner if you only have one guy to place in the corner soukh the one off the corner is better so he can't repeatedly try to kick you out of there while still getting one of his guys on the caravan each turn)

4. Flushing the caravan before the end of the second week is possibly a good idea, but sending many guys to the caravan in the third week is probably playing into his hands.

5. Defensively moving the provost far away from the corner barrel spot is a good idea if he is abusing it since many times the caravan player will be running tight on gold.

6. Until the end of the second week, the place a guy in any shop card is a key card to keep out of the clutches of the caravan player. It also works out nicely that it is generally a more lucrative card to play in the third week in general since you are more likely to have the +2 for a complete district building done to boost the gains you get from it.

7. Try to toss bad cards in before a reshuffle and wait to use good cards until after. The 3 camels card in particular and 3 gold card secondarily are fuel for the fire and their presence in the deck should be minimized if possible. In contrast, the vp cards, the put a guy on the caravan cards, and the swap camels and gold cards are mostly negative draws for them and are therefore great cards to keep in the deck. The building discount cards are for the most part neutral. During the third week the put a guy on any shop card can be used with impunity since much of the time it will be worth no more than one camel to the caravan player after the first few turns of week three.

8. I've pretty much convinced myself that drawing cards almost exclusively in week one is the way to go for the caravan player. The cards really are that good on average and the vps you achieve in week one from caravan shipments and soukh bonuses are miniscule compared with what you will be getting in later weeks if you get a solid foundation. I still think this holds true for the most part for any strategy choice in this game.

I'm still actually concerned about the whole caravan thing being possibly broken as is, but I will reserve judgement for now. I hope that it won't turn out that the best "counter" strategy is just to do the same thing yourself. All the counterstrategies above are also ignoring the fact that there are going to be two other players in the game and they exist as competition too. You will be making suboptimal plays for you while the other two guys might be getting rich.

War of the Ring Strategy: The Strider Push

Recently I've been playing a lot of War of the Ring (three games in the last four weeks). With the expansion set both sides seem pretty well balanced, but the true beauty of the game is how both sides have so many different possible approaches to choose from in prosecuting their campaigns. One of the key challenges facing the Free People side is how to earn (and keep) their two additional blue action dice.

Getting the first extra blue die is pretty easy. You simply spend a die to wake up Galadriel once Sauron goes to war. No longer must you quickly slay and resurrect Gandalf the Grey to get this die, which always seemed kind of weird to me. Activating Galadriel seems like a no-brainer to me, and I can't see any downside to bringing the great white witch onto the board, since you break even on your investment the next turn with the extra die. I think the only question is when to spend the die to bring her on. In general though, I think the sooner the better.

Even under the expansion set, the second die still only comes from morphing Strider into Aragorn. One of the most critical decisions the Free People player has to make in the game is whether to keep Strider with the Fellowship or to split him off in hopes of being crowned. Now I think its generally more worthwhile going for the die. With the new siege engine rules, Minas Tirith is now a much tougher nut for the Shadow to crack, greatly increasing the possibility that Aragorn will survive a good while after being crowned, maybe even lasting the entire game. Thus the payback on investing in the second die is now much greater. The loss of Strider from the Fellowship is offset quite a bit by the possibility of Smeagol joining the team, so the choice becomes that much easier.

It seems to me that if you're going to crown Aragorn, you probably want to do so as quickly as possible so as to maximize benefit from the extra die. I've seen this strategy labeled on various message boards as the "Strider Push." In other words, you spend every possible die and card you can during Turns 1 and, if need be, Turn 2, to rocket Strider down to Minas Tirith. Along the way, you'll probably want to dump off a hobbit in Fangorn to help muster Ents. I haven't counted spaces, but apparently with 3-4 character dice you can get him into the happy throne room, waiting for Will of the West to pop up. A good side effect of this approach is, assuming the Shadow player isn't sure what you're up to, he has wasted any dice in the Hunt Pool. Lots of dice in the Hunt Pool - push Strider. Little or no dice in the Hunt Pool - maybe still push Strider, but consider moving Fellowship to make him pay.

Of course a downside of this strategy is that the Fellowship probably takes an extended vacation in Rivendell for the first 1 or 2 turns. Assuming things aren't going too crazy on the military side, this shouldn't be a huge problem. To be safe, I might spend all my muster dice building trebuchets early to keep the bad guy a little intimidated.

Any thoughts? How would you counter this approach?