The Art of War In Middle-Earth

ME-PBM provides an excellent arena for exercising the art of war at its strategic and operational levels. Although I relish the mythic, diplomatic, economic, and role-playing aspects of ME-PBM, I am most deeply impressed by the subtlety and challenge of the military game. In this and subsequent articles I'll offer some advice by discussing the applicability to ME-PBM of some of the timeless principles of Sun Tzu's Art of War, the source )in the Griffith translation) of the quotations you will encounter below.

First, do not expect to master the military aspects of ME-PBM without first mastering the rules. You must understand the fine points of how and when armies and navies move; and how your forces interact with allies and enemies in all circumstances. Many of the numerical valuations and subroutines of combat resolution are not revealed by GSI, but careful study of the rules, question and answer forums, and your turn results will provide a dependable range of values and assumptions upon which to base your planning. Set your own general staff to study these particulars; I am too active a player to share with all you potential foes out there all of the fine points of the system which I have divined over two years of play! It should suffice to quote Master Sun:

"War is a matter of vital importance to the state; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied...Appraise it terms of the five fundamental factors... The first of these factors is moral influence; The second, weather; the third, terrain; the fourth, command; and the fifth, doctrine."

Army morale, climate/terrain and troop terrain modifiers, commander rank, and choice of tactics: if you cannot assign reasonably accurate values to your own forces and the enemy's in these areas and the others that pertain, best disband your armies and play the agent game.

Tacticians will not prevail in ME-PBM battle. Battles in this game are usually won or lost before swords are crossed. When your turn result reveals and encounter with an enemy army, there is precious little you can so to influence the outcome. You can issue or refuse challenges to personal combat; you can choose a tactic for your troops in the coming fight; and you can attempt to decline or force combat with particular enemies based on your appreciation of relative strengths and weaknesses. There is and art to all of this, and occasionally it will make a difference; but against a clever foe, in all but the most evenly balanced confrontations, none of these elements will decisively alter the outcome that was preordained when your forces collided the previous turn. "Thus a victorious army wins its victories before seeking battle; an army destined to defeat fights in the hope of winning." In five games to date, I have lost only two battles. This is evidence of realism and calculation, not genius; when I am not confident of victory, I go to great lengths to avoid battle. I advise you do the same. "He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious."

Lest you forget the over-reaching strategic and economic considerations in pursuit of a Napoleonic "decisive battle," let me advise you to keep a sense of perspective. It is all too easy to win all your battles, and lose the war. (Been there, done that.) Two considerations affecting the importance and utility of battle:

• You must get some utility out of your armies every turn to justify their cost. They must be taking enemy locations, destroying enemy armies, defending your own against real (not imagined) threats, or at least threatening your enemy in ways that force him into a disproportionately expensive response. For if you can oblige your enemy to raise and maintain expensive armies, and use them in a purely defensive manner anticipating or reacting to your moves, you may hasten his defeat by impoverishing him at little cost to yourself. "Thus, those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle. They capture his cities without assaulting them and overthrow his state without protracted operations...Your aim must be to take All-under-Heaven intact. Thus your troops are not worn out and your gains will be complete. This is the art of offensive strategy." This logic also clearly (and literally) favors taking the enemy's populations centers by threat rather than capture; an added benefit to this is that your enemy is kept guessing about the size and make-up of your armies.

• A battle lost, by accident or miscalculation, need not be a disaster. It always improves your balance sheet. And when the victor is so depleted that he can not exploit his victory by taking your population centers, he has gained little for his efforts. If he is forced to retire to rebuild his strength, you can do the same; or better yet, the forces which you could not get to the first battle can bring him to bay in his weakened state and destroy him. This bears thinking about on the turn you enter a hopeless battle. Deploy your uninvolved forces to intercept his post-battle move; don't neglect to sweep through the battle hex in case his commander either issues or refuses personal challenge, and fails to move after winning the battle.

When strategic and economic considerations and the correlation of forces do favor battle, ME- PBM rewards subtlety and calculation at the operational level. Knowing the strengths of your armies, and the capabilities of your immediate enemies, you must set out to lure them to battle under circumstances that guarantee your victory, and evade their efforts to do the same unto you. How do you do this?

• "Agitate him and ascertain the pattern of his movement." Advance against him, without committing yourself, and watch his reaction. A clever player may screen his vital locations by carefully plotted moves sweeping through the hexes you must traverse to reach target; this can be as effective, and less exploitable, than moving directly to the location you threaten. This can only be inferred, not detected directly, due to the "musical chairs" nature of the turn sequence: you can only see where everyone is when the musical stops. Another player will not respond directly to your threat, but will take the offensive, hoping to distract you from your campaign by moving against your own possessions: he may feel it's easier to find a stationary population center than to catch your army on the move. Too many players adhere to a pattern of responses that have worked for them in the past, and you can learn their style by provoking them and observing their reactions.

• "Determine his dispositions and so ascertain the field of battle...Probe him and learn where his strength is abundant and where deficient." Use all the means of intelligence-gathering that the game system provides: map data, nation messages, agent scouting actions, scrying by spells and Palantiri, recons by higher-ranked Commanders, detailed and timely information- sharing with your allies. Unless you are a true purist, collect the most current start-ups you can for all your foes, so you have a basis for your estimates of their strength. For instance, when Uvatha spots a dwarvish "army" south of the Sea of Rhun on turn 3, he should know it has to have come from 3916 and has to have recruited either once or twice before moving to get it's strength up over 100 (the early threshold for an "army" vs. "small army." The worst case estimate of it's capabilities would be based on it's standard starting configuration plus either 200 or 400 new heavy infantry. Learn it's commander's name, assign an agent to scout it, or obtain periodic population center reports, and you can track this army, and it's recruiting opportunities, even after other dwarvish armies appear in the theater (may the Dark One forbid!), and so will be able to estimate it's strength and constitution whenever you do choose to bring it to battle.

Conversely, you must deny intelligence on your forces, situations, and methods to the enemy. "All warfare is based on deception... Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity." Determine where the thresholds are that change an army's descriptor from "small army" to "army" or "large army" (they change in the course of the game!); hold your numbers just below or just above that threshold, depending on whether you wish to project an image of weakness or strength. A "small army" of heavy troops, steel/steel, with high training, morale, and command values, would be a nasty surprise to the overconfident enemy that gloatingly catches such a tiger by the tail! Other forms of deception can include:

• When an army finishes several turns of recruiting at a population center your enemy can see, move it off all the opposition's maps or to a location already holding an allied army so that a new icon does not appear; and leave behind a cadre, or move another army into the recruiting center, to create the impression that your field army is still there.

• Assume that your enemies know the strength of your starting armies; as soon as you can, and whenever an army has fought victoriously, giving the enemy a precise reading of it's strength, change commanders to throw him off; send the original commander off with a raiding party of recruiting cadre, or switch him with another known army commander. Reinforce the army as soon as you can, whether by recruiting, transferring troops from another army, or adding spells, artifacts, or upgraded weapons and armor.

• When a maneuver or a choice of tactics or orders in battle gains you victory, do not repeat the same formula for a while: "Therefore, when I have won victory I do not repeat tactics but respond to circumstances in an infinite variety of ways." For instance, the tactic vs. tactic modifier can be decisive in battle: I have seen cases where it approaches 1.5 times army strength for the advantaged side, and a nearly proportionate reduction for the disadvantaged side. There is nothing more dangerous than to reflexively choose the best tactic for your predominant troop type every time you fight; a shrewd opponent will soon learn to choose the best tactic against your standard choice, and can tip the scales drastically in his favor.

Next time, I'll delve more deeply into the tricks of the trade, particularly the fine points of maneuvering your armies to select the time and place of battle. As the old boy said, "Nothing is more difficult than the art of maneuver. What is difficult about maneuver is to make the devious route the most direct and to turn misfortune to advantage." Meantime, I'm back to the laboratory of ME-PBM, where I will see you, I hope, before you see me.