5) Divide and Conquer
Introducing Zileas
Zileas wrote a great deal about how to divide and conquer the enemy and to concentrate firepower—and so did Sun Tzu.
Zileas was talking about StarCraft and Sun Tzu was talking actual war, but since real-time strategy games are (arguably) simulations of actual war, it’s not surprising that great minds thought alike here. What’s interesting is that while Sun Tzu wrote mostly about the large, macro scale, Zileas wrote about the very same concepts on the small, micro scale. Ironically, Zileas made his fame in the StarCraft world by developing and writing about his “new school” approach to the game where he focused on dividing and conquering and concentrating firepower on the micro level, rather than the “old school” approach of concentrating on the macro level. In case you missed the irony, it’s that the old school that Zileas argued against was just another interpretation of the very same concepts his own school was based on, all straight from
The Art of War.
On the most zoomed out level, Sun Tzu tells us when to attack, based on the sheer size of the armies involved:
On the most zoomed out level, Zileas tells us when (in StarCraft) we are losing:
That last Zileas quote is pretty mystifying, but if you read it about twenty times, you might find some deep StarCraft insights!
Mismatched Forces
One of Sun Tzu’s main points is to attack an inferior force with a superior one. Even if both armies are of the same size and power, this can easily be done by looking at smaller pieces of the whole. If the enemy only defends one piece of his empire—and we know this—then the rest of his empire is wide open. We can send but a fraction of our troops to dismantle any number of his undefended spots. The more spots he defends, the weaker each spot becomes. If he defends all ten of his outposts equally and we concentrate the attack of but half our army at one spot, we outnumber him five to one! We have concentrated our firepower, while the enemy’s has been divided and weakened.
All of this rests upon the shoulders of secrecy and reconnaissance. Without these, Sun Tzu’s method of divide and conquer would not be possible.
So Sun Tzu tells us to keep our own positions and intentions secret. He tells us to discover the positions and intentions of the enemy. Through this we can concentrate our firepower on the enemy’s weakest points, even at the expense of our own defense; if our weak points are secret from the enemy, he will not know where to attack and he will likely end up dividing his own forces. Our divided enemy thus conquers himself as he cannot hope to defend against our entire concentrated army with just a fraction of his own.
[Editor's note: The upcoming section is a bit long, doesn't really pertain to BH, and is hard to apply to it. I wanted to cut some of it out, but it seemed like a good middle ground between the more theoretical Art of War and the practical BH. However, StarCraft has a lot of things that are significantly different from BH, like concentration of firepower and micromanagement. It's a good read, but you can scroll through it if you like.]
StarCraft: The “Old School”
Sun Tzu’s ways are the ways of the best StarCraft players in what Zileas calls the “old school.” These players strive to build a strong economy to finance overwhelming hordes of units. When they outnumber the enemy ten to one, they surround; five to one, they attack, you get the idea. Individual battles matter little to these players, since it’s more important to build a large mobile force capable of attacking the opponent’s weak spots.
Most of these players come from the days of Warcraft 2, StarCraft’s predecessor. Warcraft’s interface and units didn’t allow players to gain much benefit from micromanaging individual battles. Warcraft’s units were more homogeneous, meaning you didn’t see kill ratios of 50:1 like Templars and Reavers are capable of in StarCraft. In short, macromanagement was the only way to go. Build a large army. Divide the enemy’s army. Concentrate the firepower of your army.
StarCraft: The “New School”
And then there was Zileas. He came along and pointed out the amazing effects micromanagement of individual battles can have in StarCraft, and he preached the revolutionary ideas of divide and conquer and concentration of firepower—on the small scale, that is.
Lesson 1: Shift queue to concentrate firepower. When enemy forces engage, say ten marines versus ten marines, they will fire at each other in a mostly random distribution, so units will only start dying toward the end of the battle. The better player will select all his marines and concentrate their firepower on a single enemy marine, then (hold the shift key to) queue the next command to concentrate firepower on the second enemy marine, and so forth. All ten of the first player’s marines will kill one of the enemy’s units right away, reducing his firepower. The ten marines will then automatically (through shift queuing) concentrate their fire on the next enemy unit, then the next one, and so on. The enemy is dividing his own fire but the better player concentrates it. If you use this technique but your opponent doesn’t, you’ll probably end the fight with four marines left when he is down to none.
Lesson 2: Use formation to concentrate firepower. When two enemy forces engage, say ten marines versus ten marines, formation can be everything. If one player marches his single file line of marines into a horizontal line of enemy marines, the horizontal line formation will be able to concentrate its fire on the first marine in the single file line, then the second, and so on. The last marines in the single file line won’t even be close enough to fire until all their friends are dead. Even better than a horizontal line is “shallow encirclement,” a crescent-shaped formation that maximizes the firepower one can apply to a point.
Lesson 3: Use choke points (narrow passes) to divide the enemy’s units. When a large enemy force must pass through a narrow choke point (either naturally created by terrain or artificially created by your buildings) he is dividing his own force for you. You can concentrate your firepower on each unit as it passes by.
There are more lessons, but his point is to focus on the concentration of firepower on the small scale of an individual battle. I cannot leave out Zileas’s most extreme and signature use of concentration of firepower: his “Doom Drop.”
Zileas is known for playing the Protoss race, the race smallest in numbers and most powerful in punch. Notice that they are already concentrated before he even got a hold of them. A so-called Doom Drop is when you fill about four shuttles (flying transports that carry other units) with amazingly powerful Protoss attack units such as Reavers, Templars, and Archons. (Heavily armored air units (Scouts) must sometimes accompany the shuttles.) This superabundance of force—this concentration of firepower—is enough to overwhelm nearly anything so long as it is applied instantly at a single point. When one Archon, three Reavers, four Zealots, and three Templars suddenly appear in the middle of your base, the sheer force of it all applied to your surely badly positioned units is usually too much.
Even more devastating is what Zileas calls his “Extra Crispy with Slaw” version of the Doom Drop, where he uses hallucinated (illusionary) units to draw fire. Flying four shuttles into an enemy base is not an easy task, because they’ll probably be shot down by whatever anti-air happens to be scattered about. Four Shuttles accompanied by, say, five Scouts is another matter. Now the anti-air fire has been divided among more targets. Better still if all these targets are accompanied by, say, ten illusionary Scouts. The illusions can’t attack, but they draw enemy fire giving the real units more time to act. In effect, the illusions divide and conquer the enemy’s anti-air fire. Deception at its best.
Micro and Macro
Why not apply Sun Tzu’s teachings of divide and conquer and concentration of firepower on the large scale as well as the small? Must one choose one over the other? The answer in StarCraft, realistically, is yes. One only has so much attention that must be divided between micro Extra Crispy with Slaw Doom Drops and macro economy horde-building.
The Third Resource: Concentration
Zileas explains:
[Editor's note: Concentration isn't as strictly required for BH compared to StarCraft (and the "talent gap" discussed here doesn't really apply, thankfully), but it could dictate things like the ability to not choke from an advantageous position. Training it using two or three ladder games at once is interesting food for thought. Another interesting thing to think about is how Zileas innovated the widespread use of micromanagement in StarCraft, when it has not yet been done in BH. Perhaps there is greater potential for micromanagement in this tier, and we just haven't had someone to introduce it yet. How do you think micromanagement could be used/is already being used in BH?]
Whether you, as a player, spend your concentration resources on the large scale or the small depends on which game is at hand and your personal style. In either case, the same principles are at work. On one level or another, thou shalt concentrate thy fire and divide and conquer thine enemy!
