Part 2: Contact and Fighting in Battles

When we play RTS's or some other strategy game with armies, we send our army to fight the enemy. While it does, however, not every single infantryman is shooting or hitting the enemy soldiers. Usually only a few of our regiments or troops will be fighting a few of the enemy regiments or troops. In the meantime, the spearmen on the flanks or the fusiliers in reserve just stand there, waiting to be sent to the fight.

Hence, the draining of hp only happens in the points where units from the two armies fight. Also, points of contact may be where only one side is damaging the other. For example, if hidden riflemen are firing on an enemy column.

By definition, these points are where the draining takes place. Therefore, in order to drain the enemy's hp faster, we need only worry about draining it faster in the contact points. This has great implications now, when I will talk about units of different hp and/or dps.

It dictates the economy of power. In a medieval-ish setting, if we have a limited amount of magic that makes soldiers' swords flaming, when the enemy comes our way we want to only enchant the infantry that are fighting. In a Napoleonic setting, if some part of the enemy's army is close to ours and engaging us, we want to aim the cannons at the enemy companies that are exchanging shots with ours. That's because the faster we kill the troops that are killing our troops, the more infantrymen we will have left. Bringing us to part 1 and the mutual draining.

We could ask, why not aim the cannons at the main mass of the enemy army instead? Well, it depends on the game mechanics. If the enemy are too far, cannon shot gets inaccurate and miss, which is a waste of dps. If the enemy is among trees, the artillery is less damaging. On the other hand, if the enemy is sending more companies to reinforce the fighting ones, we may want to fire at them if we can hurt or delay them enough. This would isolate the first enemy company, allowing us to overrun them. Napoleon massed his artillery in such a way to create gaps in the enemy line. We may even want to fire at some part of the enemy army ourselves, creating new points of fighting.  Whether we should or not is decided by crunching all the numbers – speed, hp, dps, etc. –  and since in reality we can't, it is decided by experience.

But the point (no pun intended) is, there are one or few areas where troops from both sides are hitting each other during battles. It resonates with what the updated 3-0 field manual states. One of the principles of war, whatever those are, is mass – to 'concentrate the effects of combat power at the decisive place and time' (4-39). In wargaming, this means directing our army's combat power, its cannons, magics, cavalry or air units, at these areas where the fighting is. We may save some, but expend enough to reach higher dps than the enemy. Thusly, on the larger scale of the battle, we are slowly winning.