zilfallon wrote:They know Wanda has 'Pliers. Even a mid-rate leader should be able to say "hmm, they'll bomb our troops and will then decrypt, we are in a bad situation already so we shouldn't give any unnecessary casualties."
I'm sorry, but this is demonstrably untrue, even in our own world.
Trammenis isn't a bad leader. But he's up against tactics that no one, ever, in the history of Erfworld, has ever even thought about, let alone fielded. Many brilliant military tacticians have fallen prey to situations like this. The Battle of Agincourt is one such example.
The French army in the Battle of Agincourt was confident of victory, as it consisted largely of mounted knights, which were considered the most deadly units available at the time. The English forces consisted mainly of longbowmen, which were considered weak. Guess which side won?
The plain fact is that most military tacticians are extremely good at thinking inside the box, but often lack the capability to think outside it. They are able to win their battles because the tactics they employ are tried and true: the rolling advance, divide and conquer, guerilla warfare. When someone comes up with a genuinely new tactic, it is often employed to absolutely devastating effect because absolutely no one saw it coming. For example, the tactic which we know as blitzkrieg seems trivially obvious today, but during the opening months of World War Two, it was considered new and ingenious, and allowed Germany to claim victory after victory with few losses.
Trammenis hasn't considered the possibility of Wanda Decrypting the infantry in the Atrium because, up until this point, absolutely no one has attempted to move from air to ground through exploitation of the falling mechanic. He has absolutely no way to see it coming. It's never been done before. It's highly doubtful whether the other sides in Erfworld even known about The Banana Exploit. They couldn't even fathom a plan which allows units to move from the airspace to the Atrium off-turn. It has never even been considered, let alone done. Trammenis could be one of the greatest Warlords to ever live, and it's doubtful that he would see it coming.
He's not holding the idiot ball. He's just not omniscient.
The way you quoted it, makes it seem like an entirely different post. I didn't say that Parson is known to be an innovative thinker. My sentence:
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