The Basic Battle Cycle

Those who play strategy games understand the concept war, on the “game level”. Reinforcement, multi-tasking, micro-managment, concepts which are not alien to an experienced gamer. However, before somebody reaches a certain level of expertise in strategy games, they will often have to improve their skills and abilities, as well as familiarize themself with certain concepts of war, which might work in a game. One of these is what may be called the Basic Battle Cycle. If you played any strategy game, you might had noticed that a war or a battle has its stages. What we might not notice is that these stages are in fact a closed cycle, and the one thing which decides when the next stage occurs is initiative, which might sound like a purely RPG concept (who strikes first) but it applies to war as well. How? Read on.