asneakyfox:

lumsel:

You know I never read Ender’s Game? I only watched the movie that nobody liked. I do know there’s a big deal in the book where Ender comes up with this insanely good new strategy paradigm where he rethinks the orientation of the zero-g playfield, imagining the enemy as below him rather than to the side (hm, there’s probably some symbolism there). But that makes me wonder, does that actually make sense as a thing that nobody else would have figured out? I feel like that sort of thing would be clocked early on in the metagame. I guess it’s a bunch of children’s teams competing against each other, and maybe none of them were checking the competitive zero-g laser tag subreddit for all the latest strats, like reddit was banned on the school computers in their space academy or whatever.

That really does tie in with the difficulty of writing intelligent tacticians though. You can write smarter characters than yourself, contrary to popular belief; you can have them come up with ideas in seconds that took you a week, or you can have them notice details and come to conclusions that, while logical, would be easy to miss if you the author didn’t know the answer already.

But with battle tactics there’s a sense that the character has time to plan and is up against other people who should also be pretty smart. You’re not putting the characters in a locked room mystery, you’re putting them into the full scope of all military history (real or imagined) and trying to have them distinguish themselves within that context. Oten the coolest flashiest tactics are something that should have been figured out decades ago given how effective they are, or just like straight up perfidy or something where there’s a good reason why everyone’s not doing it.

It would be an interesting challenge to write a genuinely skilled tactician, where I guess you try and get around this issue by focusing on microdecisions they make under pressure. Organisational decisions before a battle, or adapting to specific terrain, or ensuring they have contingencies for if their plans fall through. Avoid the big flashy stuff like “Commander Bigballs had a trick up his sleeve: he was the only dude in this sci-fi setting to remember that newton’s third law exists”. Not to say I’m asserting this has never been done before, I’m sure there’s reams of books with good tactical writing, but it’s neat to ponder nonetheless.

Oh, and to answer the question: Gender’s Aim. I support the Agenda, of course.

this has unearthed a big childhood flashback for me because “the enemy gate is down” did totally work for me as a tactical insight that others wouldn’t have thought of.

but that’s not the move that gets ender through his final test in battle school. his key insight in the last school fight is, ok, every fight so far has ended with one team eliminating all the other soldiers, and then there’s a victory ceremony where they take control of the enemy gate. and what ender does there is that he realizes taking the gate is not just a ritual to celebrate your victory, it’s the actual win condition; you don’t have to eliminate the enemy team. so he sneaks a small squad past the front lines and takes the enemy gate before anyone notices.

the thing is, that was so obvious to me i’d been assuming they were doing it the whole time.