this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I probably say this shit every time someone mentions that book but when i eas really serious about getting good at starcraft broodwar i read the art of war to learn about army tactics (i was a teen, okay!? It felt very fucking clever at the time)
The entire book can be boiled down to a couple points.
Try not to fight unless you have an overwhelming force because long battles and sieges are not very fun
If you have to do a real battle try to fuck with the opposing army or trick them into thinking your position is way better than it is so they might decide it's not worth it
If you really really have to fight for real, use the terrain to your advantage.
No i haven't read it since then
Also, the most important point: logistics!
"Your army is composed of people that consume resources while marching from point A to point B. If you don't have resources, you lose. Do not fucking forget this." -- Sun Tzu
Always feed your guys. If you don't feed your guys, they're not yours anymore.
It's worth mentioning that he also said that if you're in a strong position then you should trick them into believing it is weak, because overall the point is to misinform your enemy so they make choices that they wouldn't have made with full and accurate knowledge.
While a lot of this is extremely banal, like "take the high ground", some of it is interesting, like he emphasizes making sure the enemy has a way to escape so that the enemy soldiers don't feel compelled to fight to the death, which is more costly for you. idk if that's useful for Starcraft, though.
Also the rule 0 that he heavily emphasizes is that it's typically better to avoid fighting at all, but that definitely isn't helpful for Starcraft.
If your enemy is an absolute dingus, trick him into chaining his ships together, and then read a weather almanac to guesstimate the most likely wind direction. Ram your enemy's chained ships with a blockade runner filled with explosives, using the wind to spread the flames. Then watch the carnage from afar.
-- Zhou Yu
TBH, Cao Cao was a very competent general on land, but had zero knowledge about fighting on water and had to rely on his advisors, one of whom was actually working for his enemies and gave him this idea as deliberate sabotage.
Never take naval advice from Pang Tong, worst mistake of my life
-- Cao Cao
noooo {曹|cáo}{操|cāo} what is u doing bb
Yeah i gave up on the but half way because i realized there's a bit more than i set up there to be.
Trash talk your opponent so hard, they ragebait and quit.
It can even be boiled down further to do what wins and that's still insightful because most of us are running around doing what feels right or whatever lol
I have to regularly ask myself is this actually going to achieve the outcome I want? And sometimes the answer is no and I still do it anyway
Chester Nimitz version of "Is the proposed operation likely to succeed? What might the consequences of failure? Is it in the realm of practicability in terms of material and supplies?" is another really funny, super obvious sounding piece of advice
It specifically took a genius to point out that putting armor on bullet damage of returning planes was dumb, because the planes could keep flying with that damage, and you'd need to put armor where there were no bullet holes at all
That one's a myth. The various mathematicians credited with it were members of the team that collected and collated the stats in the first place and there's no record of the data being misunderstood in the manner the funny anecdote presents it. The famous diagram associated with it is also not from their report and isn't the right kind of plane.
It's basically the scene in The Office where Dwight explains how he follows Michael's advice of not being an idiot.
it seems obvious but you gotta contend that since time immemorial, incredibly stupid people have been given command of armies.
Bringing me back to a Starcraft 1 map that I made once upon a time for 1v1 games with my cousin. I called it "Nebraska." It was a max-size map with absolutely no terrain whatsoever, and pockets of minerals and vespene in each of the four corners and along the outer borders near the center.
I don't remember if it was a "real" copy of SC1, or if we were playing a hacked version of the shareware edition with this map added in to replace Byways, but we were playing a dial-up game to test out the map with both of us as Terran. I started in with the classic Terran defense -- siege tanks, turrets, and bunkers in a huge line across the center of the map, starting from the corner where my first command center had spawned in. I made it about halfway across the map -- and had started a second "wall" of the same from the opposite side, which only made it around a quarter of the way across -- when a couple of my cousin's marines blundered into it and immediately got blown to pieces by the tanks. A few seconds later, I saw the ComSat scanner sweep sparkles over a nearby section of The Wall. He didn't know it at the time, but nearly all of the bunkers were empty.
He then tried to send a wave of units down. I had been spamming command centers with nuke silos and already had ghosts positioned around his outermost defenses, and just waited around for his troops to pass by. I had nothing to follow it up with (unless I started moving my tanks, but then those would have no anti-air support) because all my supplies were devoted to three nukes and a fuckload of tanks, but I figured what the hell, and started letting the nukes fly. The first one took out what turned out to be all of his turrets -- and therefore all of his stealth detectors; he didn't have any science vessels yet -- and the second trashed most of his supply depots and about half his SCVs. He ragequit before I could launch the third. If he had found the gap in the wall and wandered through it, I had no defenses.
We didn't play much after that.
Loading up the Byways map on the full version was always a blast though; burrowed Zerg are hilarious on those secondary resource deposit locations.
Yeah, making maps like that was really fun. I do miss being able to play without all the meta knowledge but it is still fun to 1v3 laypeople and win. One of the only times people look at me like I'm a wizard