The best/optimal strategy is always an attacking/aggressive one. Discuss.

Great Debates
1

It should be noted from the outset that I am discussing strategies with respect to all games, business, warcraft and general sociological activity (basically stuff where there is an objective with people involved).

Okay so here’s the proposition. In order to achieve a particular result/objective (for example, in a game of chess to force the opponent into checkmate) the most successful strategy to adopt is one which is very attack-minded.

This doesn’t necessarily mean more active, as I would think you can be equally active when pursuing a defensive strategy. Being aggressive would entail employing a more assaulting formation/plan upon the enemy (whether that is your foe in combat or chess or whatever).

For me, without having expertise in any field that comes to mind (warfare or chess), the concept is hard to define. But I would hope that you can understand what I mean when I say that basically, attacking is “thrusting” whereas defending is “shielding”.

In simple terms, an attack is an attempt to crush your enemy/opponent, but to defend is to protect yourself from any attack made by your enemy/opponent.

So isn’t it more reasonable to say that an attacking strategy is always more effective?

The logic goes that if you attack 100 times in quick succession, out of the 100 you are bound to make a breakthrough maybe 10 times (I don’t think this applies to chess though). Your opponent cannot attack you at the same time as defending themselves, so hence you do not have to employ any sort of defensive strategy (there’s the golden phrase, “best form of defense is attack”).

But let’s face it, if you are under this constant barrage of attacks, you have to defend yourself in a losing position. You can’t really counter-attack, and eventually the opponent will break through your defense anyway.

So why would someone bother with a defensive strategy at all? Isn’t it more wise to concentrate on a skillful attack, and not trouble yourself with any defense?

Are there any circumstances where concentrating on defense becomes an optimal strategy (assuming that an attack-minded strategy is still an option)? If so, what are the elements of a situation which dictate whether a defensive or offensive strategy should be employed?

Remember to freely use your own examples but please explain them.

2

In all honestly, all I can say is…it depends. Myself, when I game, I usually use a mixed strategy, with a solid defense, while carefully positioning my counter attacks and thrusts to achieve maximum disruption. In many games I actually stress a defensive strategy early (like Total War) while in others I play a bit more agressively. I’ve found, playing against humans, that people that basically adopt the standard ‘tank rush’ offensive, generally lose to a more balanced player who uses both offensive and defensive techniques.

From Xavier

The other side of this, of course, is that I, on the defensive, if my position is strong enough, can basically have you break your teeth on my defense (either tactically or strategically, though I assume you are talking tactically) with a minimum amount of resources spent…while you, on the offensive, will be taking the maximum amount of damage and using the maximum amount of resources.

From Xavier

Tell you what…I’ll play you one day on the tactical part of Total War: Medeval, and we’ll see if defense is worthless. :slight_smile: Again, there is a time and place for both.

-XT

3

The Battle of the Somme. 'Nuff said.

4

Eh? I can give you any number of theoretical games where attacking is a losing proposition (the simplist being “Each turn choose to attack or defend. If you attack and the opponent defends you lose, else try again.”) Or there’s actual game examples. Or there’s some real world examples above. Do you want more?

Shall we assume you’re asking if attacking is normally the best strategy? Or the best strategy in the kind of game naturally developed by humans? Or something? Then we can get a debate going.

5

Gallipoli also is a good example. Battle of the Bulge. The early Barbarosa campain from the Russians side is a great example of using space and distance to counteract a superior offensive, trading territory for time and defusing an offensive to the point where local counter attacks can overwhelm local forces. The early stages of the Korean war…in fact the Korean war is a good example of using both defensive and offensive techniques.

The thing is, if you are thinking in terms of the modern US military, we really HAVE no peers, so we have adopted a much more offensively oriented strategy (and tactics). We can do this because no one out there is even in the same universe as our military atm, which makes the whole ‘shock and awe’ tactic so effective for us…at this moment in time. If opponents are more evenly matched, then a more balanced approach is called for.

-XT

6

Militarily, all other things being equal, defense is the stronger of the two. The defenders can dig in and conceal themselves, while the attackers have to expose themselves while moving forward. The general maxim is that the attacker needs to mass a 3-1 advantage over the defender at the point of decision in order to assure a successful advance, with the required ratio going up to 9-1 when facing a strong, well prepared series of defensive lines. A strategy that is purely defensive will of course only produce a stalemate, but a defensive posture with the intention of going over to the counter-offensive can be very powerful. A good example is the Battle of Kursk, fought in the summer of 1943 on the Eastern Front in World War II. A bulge existed in the lines centered on the city of Kursk. Rather than attempting to take the initiative themselves during the summer, the Soviet high command heavily fortified their positions and built up large reserves both within the Kursk salient itself and on its flanks. The German offensive made little headway against the Soviet positions while taking heavy casualties. Once the attack stalled and the German reserves had been committed, the USSR launched two powerful counter-offensives against both of the German flanks.

7

Not necessarily.
It is true that players like Tal, Shirov and Morozevich would not hesitate to sacrifice pieces to get at the enemy king.
But players like Karpov, Adams and Andersson will crush the life out of you without taking any risks. They will just be more efficient in placing their pieces.

On a lower level, I personally have won inumerable games by capturing just one pawn when my opponent slightly overreached his attack. I then play a series of safe moves, designed to exchange pieces (and if my opponent avoids this by retreating my pieces gradually take over the board), and finish up by winning an ending where the extra pawn is sufficient.
No need for threats, complications or ‘attacking’ moves.

8

Always is too strong a word. There’re quite a number of gaming situation where it’s to your advantage to be attacked rather than to attack. I think that this is a faulty premise.

9

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Knowledge is power.

Find out first what you’re up against.

Love

10

Whoever has the most platitudes on their side wins.

11

shhh…

12

Let’s go toast some Zerg!

13

Take for example the old board game Axis and Allies. In the game, men are the cheapest units. They have a 1 in 6 chance of scoring a hit when they attack. But, they have a 2 in 6 chance of scoring a hit when they’re attacked. So, for the USSR, (poorest player in the game), the optimal strategy is buy many men and be attacked. If the USSR buys the more expensive pieces, it cannot buy enough to compete with the wealthier players. If it attacks with the men, it gets only half of the potential effects. The best strategy is buy a lot of men and defend Mother Russia until the other Allies can bail your happy ass out.

14

I like using a combination of men and fighter planes in Axis and Allies when playing Russia. Its actually possible to bail yourself out if you are patient and play a smart game. Its one of my favorite board games, though I haven’t played the expansion games yet (there is a Europe Axis and Allies and a Pacific Theather Axis and Allies now).

-XT

15

Toast Zerg indeed! Entaro Adune!

Unfortunately, this is far too broad to have a simple “always attack” phiosophy apply. For instance, in business, the always attack strategy consists of building better widgets for lower pricess. This doesn’t seem to apply to the same principles as warfare. I guess what I am saying is that the “best” strategy depends so heavily on the particular “objective” that you can’t pick a single one.

I enjoy playing Starcraft. It requires balancing the economic development with military tactics. I tend to opt for a modified defensive strategy. I tend not to extend myself (attacking) without securing my economic centers. I think the best strategy is to allow the enemy to attack me where I am strong and to attack him where he is weak. Sun-Tsu said it better, but that works for me.

16

My apologies, but all your bases are belong to us!

17

Long distance running.
Notre Dame football.
Revolutionary war.
Some forms of Martial arts
boxing sometimes.
sometimes in checkers.
Anytime you can have the attacker become exhausted, you can easily take him over.
It really depends on the opponent compared to the defender
If someone keeps attacking and you stop them everytime, they might run out of forces/stamina or something

18

Yes, you have to have the fighters. They are reusable because they can land in your fortified territories. This keeps the option of attacking open. But, generally, (but not always), USSR’s attacks are made in order to provoke an attack from the Axis. That’s where the bang for the buck comes in.
If the Axis is playing a smart game as well, you should be knee-deep in it for a while. But let’s not kid our selves, w/o the UK and the USA at least tying up Axis armies successfully, the USSR falls fairly quickly. What happens is that the USSR comes in the back door to their previously lost territories. Mostly the USSR just has to keep the Axis from turning their backs.

Anyway, I love the game too. Do you have the PC version by any chance? You could email me and we could play some some day maybe?

Xavier,
I think you’re all alone out there with your “always attack” strategy.

19

Let’s move from military strategy to romance.

In the traditional setup, the men propose to the women, who either say yes or no. We can model this with something called the Stable Marriage Algorithm (in computer science it’s mostly used in networking, but you can model actual marriages with it too).

Let’s say you have n men and n women who want to get married to one another. We want to find an arrangement of marriages such that nobody wants to trade spouses and no two people would rather be married to each other than their current spouses (if one half of a marriage wants to be married to someone else, but their affection is not returned, that’s fine). We assume vanilla one-man-one-woman marriages here; homosexual and polyamorous versions of the problem exist, and are much harder (in some cases impossible) to solve.

Each man has a list of all the women, ordered from the woman he most wants to marry to the woman he least wants to marry. Simiarly each woman has a list of all the men, from the man she likes best to the man she likes least. In a stable arrangement,

The algorithm is as follows:
[ul]
[li]In the morning, each woman goes out and stands on her balcony.[/li]
[li]In the afternoon, each man looks at his list of women and goes to the balcony of the woman who he likes best.[/li]
[li]Once all the men have done that, each woman looks out at the crowd of men at her balcony and tells the one she likes best, “Come back tomorrow”. All of the other men erase this woman’s name from their lists. Women who don’t have anyone at their balconies do nothing.[/li]
[li]Everybody goes home and goes to bed, and repeats the process the next day. We stop repeating when each woman tells someone to “come back tomorrow”.[/li][/ul]

This algorithm is guaranteed to produce a stable arrangement of marriages, as we defined it above. The interesting thing, though, is that the resulting arrangement is man-optimal and woman-pessimal. That is, things are as good as they could possibly be for every man, and as bad as they could possibly be for every woman!

It’s not too hard to see why this is so. The men start at the tops of their lists and work their way down, stopping when they hit a woman who likes them better than any of their other choices. The women wait for men to come to them, so while they pick their best choice on each day, they’re starting with their least favorite choices and working their way up.

So if you’re seeking romantic involvement, being aggressive really is the winning strategy.

In general, I’d say that in any game with a zero or negligable cost to aggression, pure balls-to-the-wall offense is the best strategy. This isn’t true in warfare or chess, where attacking always requires you to weaken your position and often requires a material sacrifice as well.

20

Playing defense is good, but you cannot win until you attack. At some point, you have to go on the offensive.