Plot holes matter in direct proportion to the seriousness of the work. People care a lot more about plot holes in The Lord of the Rings than they do in The Colour of Magic.
People don’t always behave consistently. A lot of plot holes can be explained away that way, and readers/viewers instinctively do that, because they don’t have the assumption that people are consistent.
I don't see how it matters if it involves science fiction or not.
I am looking for verisimilitude, so I am always asking myself if characters' actions make sense, consistency in the rules, and so forth. There has to be a kind of internal logic a story follows, even if characters constantly make stupid decision.
Most stories failed that test because writers don't care.
Here's an example: There are magic carpet everywhere that can fly, and yet nothing changed about the worldbuilding. People just drive cars and do all the modern things people do, except sometime you can see magic carpets showing up.
Elves could be released from the Halls of Mandos and reincarnated. It wasn't totally common, but it happened in the Tolkien's world more than once.
There is, for example, a remark in The Silmarillion that "Finrod walks with Finarfin his father beneath the trees in Eldamar". Finrod was killed in Sauron's captivity in Middle Earth.
It could be fairly common, but they would be reincarnated in Aman where Mandos is and thus would have to have sailed back to Middle Earth in order to show up in the stories. There’s just not a lot of traffic going in that direction by the the Third Age.
This is the sort of article (long, detailed, written by a high-level expert) which reassures me that NO, I really shouldn't bother to watch movies (or TV, etc.). Once you're past the visual spectacle, and "everybody else is watching"...movies, TV, etc. are generally inferior to books. And consistent competence is far easier to find in authors than in studios + producers + writers + directors + ...
(Article is from 2020...OTOH, the article is hardly about 2020 situations or events.)
There are exceptions. I found The Martian's movie much more entertaining than the book (I've read the book before the movie came out). The book felt like a shore most of the time.
The book felt almost like a screenplay to me; I suspected when I read it that it would make a solid movie.
Also you can go into more technical detail in a book than you can in a film, and maybe detail wasn't important to the plot of the Martian, but I felt book-Mark's desperation a lot more clearly because of how difficult it would be for me to be clear-headed enough to think through everything that was necessary to stay alive.
If your definition of worthwhile entertainment is accurate medieval military operations... most books wouldn't make the cut either. LOTR is pretty unique in terms of the depth of its world building.
With the number of books, articles, movies, videos, etc. available these days...quickly ruling out most of them can be pretty darn useful. :)
(LOTR-style world building seems orthogonal to plausible portrayals of military operations. If a kitchen scene in a TV sitcom showed a stuffed turkey getting cooked faster than some breakfast cereal got mushy in milk...would you need any backstory to say "a stupid mistake, or a running gag, or satire"?)
The author goes into problems caused by the inherent differences between writing a book and making a movie.
>I think there’s one question left to be answered here, and that’s why Peter Jackson? Why? And I think we can answer this question, because while Jackson’s arrangement makes about no military sense at all, in terms of film construction, it makes a lot of sense.
< problems listed and explained here >
>So while mashing the operational context of this sequence into unrecognizable mush saddens me, I have to say I honestly cannot see a better way to do it while still resolving these problems, keeping in mind the strict restrictions on screentime (which makes adding an Edoras-Éowyn B-plot – technically a C-plot, since this is the B-plot to Frodo’s A-plot – effectively impossible). Alas that it came at the cost of my beloved logistics studies, but as far as sins of adaptation go, this one is a reasonable and necessary evil.
Yes. And the (excellent, IMO) author said many more such things (about movie-making requiring that reality be carted off to the rubbish tip) in the rest of the series. Though there are also fair number of places where the author concluded that Peter Jackson has no excuse but "ignorant, and didn't care".
Hence my "stick to books" (and certain magazines, and web sites like HN, and ...) conclusion.
Reading this brings back childhood memories of reading Two Centuries of Warfare (Chant, Holmes, and Koenig). I think this is why I've always both been attracted to and deeply disappointed by RTS games. The resource gathering, materiel production, troop mobilisation, and supply aspects don't live up to the (perhaps unfairly expected) promise inherent in the name.
> [Operations] is a level of analysis between tactics (how do I fight the battle when I get there?) and strategy (why am I fighting overall?).
Does anyone here know a book dedicated to these topics? I always wanted to pick a "military textbook" (assuming such a thing exists), apply its lessons to Age of Empires, and see how far that gets me.
You should browse acoup because he often mentions sources for different avenues of thought. He even has a tag for [operations] [1]
Now that I am searching - he does use the operations level mainly to make fun of books, series and movies where his historical examples have more sources.
Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are classics, but for epic battles closer to realism, I rather recommend the Total War series than Age of Empire.
Mainly, because in real war, troop morale is a main factor - and the best war tactics are those, that crush the enemies spirit and not their bones.
This is a main quote from Sun Tzu(from the back of my head): if you manage to route the enemy forces in panic, you gain more, than slaughtering them all.
Because they will spread the fear of your troops themself.
(but this part is not captured well in total war, as there you gain indeed benefits from high body count and enemy troops remain the same fighting spirit, even if they ran away in terror all the battles before)
My favorit parts was about the honorable leader being exposed to being shamed, that's a good introduction to Machiavelli and real politics.
Also where he says that great victories seem obvious and seamless because of great preparations of the leader -- like lifting a hare doesn't seem a great feat of strenght.
But the stuff about tactics is also very good, though on second thought when to attack and when not to, strength ratio and forces positioning probably is more about strategy than tactics.
Also about the political ends and not just the military, even though he says when the decision to go to war the political lord should not interfere with the decision of his general is usually turned on its head a lot and people often forget that war should not be an end in itself and the military should not get more power than the political and ultimate strategy is not about the military.
War was the worst outcome in the day of Sun Tzu as much as today and overall people were much worse after a war(except for a very small minority)-- like the people who think US should have kept the Vietnam war going, or that WW1 Germany military was betrayed, or USSR should have hept on fighting the Cold War and so on.
If you can rout the enemy force in TW, it then becomes massively easier to destroy them completely. Soldiers that are running away can't do much damage to their pursuers. As soon as you turn your back on your enemy, your chances of being killed increase dramatically.
If you rout your enemy in TW, you are offered the choice to accept a victory, or to continue fighting. Unless I'm bored, I always run them down; I don't want them retrained and reinforced, to come back later with added experience points.
In Napoleon TW, the best units for running down routed enemy troops are light cavalry. I suspect that's what lancers were really for.
Sure, in a single battle you want to route the enemy as fast as possible.
But my point was, that in the next battle all those troops that ran away are fully restored, so yes the winning tactic is to have light cavalery to chase them down, (which is what they were used for in real life, too.)
So Sun Tzus advice to sometimes let the enemy run away on purpose, so their fear infects other enemy troops for easier future battles - is not captured.
In some TW games this is slightly modeled in, in the sense, that a unit might choose to fight till death, rather than running away, when they are surrounded and they have nowhere to run. So then you open up a way .. and they will try to run again, which is easier to finish them without own casualties.
But those are hardcoded algorithms.
The units do not really learn. (that would be awesome, but is very very hard to implement in realtime in a proper way) They just improve their stats with experience. So they get stronger in stats in either case, even when fleeing every single battle.
At least for Rome Total War and Medieval II, experience does mean a difference. A veteran army will fight for several times longer against overwhelming odds than a newly recruited one before breaking. It also depends on training: even green Roman troops will last longer in prolonged battle than green Gallic ones. Do not remember how later games deal with that. One thing the author of this series stresses is that battle is very emotional and you can't learn from a book that running away is a bad idea.
I would suggest looking into proper wargames if you are interested in applying realworld military strategy or tactics: Gary Grigsby series, Combat Mission series, The Operational Art of War, Graviteam Tactics, and Campaign Series are all pretty solid simulation-oriented computer wargames. Total War is kinda ok too but in general most rts are going to be won by player APM and doing optimal builds (which work due to arbitrary game mechanics) and real world strategy wont really work out due to simplified mechanics and pace. For instance, most 'strategy' games don't model morale or spotting at all. To say nothing of operational concerns like equipment availability or condition.
I am only a half rank higher then before reading the books and the improvement could be also because of more playtime, but it really influenced my decision making. Actually I came to the decision to play aggressive openings only, build more traps, do hit and run attacks whenever I can and get more distractions before and while my attacks (sending some lings before spawning two nydus tunnels at two different locations really helps).
If you want a pop sci introduction, Tom Schelling's Strategy of Conflict is great.
It won't help you do any better in strategy games, though.
A big part of the reason for that is that two player games we play for fun like Star Craft are inherently set up as zero sum games. From a game theory point of view, you just minimax and are done. (You might need some randomisation to be optimal.)
The really interesting parts of game theory are non-zero sum games.
If you have specific questions about how military units are organized in the modern era, I would really suggest downloading US army manuals on various topics from the era that you want more information about. For example, if you want to learn how US officers were trained to attack a city, download the manual about it, and it talks about what infrastructure to blow up first, how to handle communications, what formations to use, and so on and so forth. It's a lot more direct than reading a conventional history of a war. You can get answers to questions like "how did soldiers learn to move with stealth during the Vietnam war" by reading the manual more efficiently than you can from general histories.
I really recommend reading military material and not trying to glean things from games or fiction. The latter lean heavily on rule of cool versus rule of not dying and killing the other guy more effectively.
Something that always confused me. How come current tactical manuals are not classified? If tactics change, why let an opposing force read all about it? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it but it does strike me as weird.
(In the UK the equivalent manuals are classified, albeit at a low-level).
It's a bit like knowing the general rules of chess vs. having a specific gambit for use in a particular game. Some of the information in the manuals is common military knowledge, e.g. how convoys work, how to position forces making use of cover, etc. In effect the military laws-of-physics.
What usually remains classified are the detailed Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) associated with given weapon systems or specialist force elements. Also, plans for specific operations are usually 'born secret' and tend to remain classified as that would give away thinking.
Probably because it isn't worth doing. Let's say you really wanted to make your infantry tactics classified at the secret level. Getting any security clearance takes a long time. Are you going to make every new infantry recruit get a secret clearance before they begin training? If not, how do you plan to teach them how to do their job?
Now imagine you want to send military trainers to help build up a friendly nation's military. What are they allowed or not allowed to teach?
It also isn't that hard for other countries to use aerial or satellite surveillance to see what you're doing. Infantry tactics need to be practiced outside. How will you stop other countries from observing your tactics during training exercises?
"I really recommend reading military material and not trying to glean things from games or fiction. The latter lean heavily on rule of cool versus rule of not dying and killing the other guy more effectively. "
Very true, but there are still some games, that are more realistic, than others, so you can learn real tactics from them. And I enjoy them more, than the "cool" games, despite having no intentions of ever being close to a real battlefield.
- Operation Flashpoint, a shooter (later Arma) is an example, that is also actually used by some real armies as a training simulation (but in a modified version).
- Close combat series, is a tactical strategy game, where you command small units in WW2. (which can run out of ammunition, or simply run away or surrender, if they are under too much pressure)
- Total War series, for big old school battles, with Units in tight formations against each other.
And about realism and coolness and war: I actually think, all those glorifying Call of Duties etc. for example are really dangerous for the minds of the teens playing it, as they show mainly the glorious side. There are no civilians for example. You can just blow up allmost anything and the game rewards you for it. (mostly)
In those games, I never had a moment, like I had with Operation Flashpoint. In one add on, you fought as the red army against resistance. So people in civilian clothing, but some with guns that want to kill you. And this is what matters, since one bullet can kill you - so you shoot at them. At anything that moves. But after the battle you see, oh. Most of them were really harmless civilians. And you shot them, because you were scared, that they shoot you. There was no glory in that. But it left a deep impression with me and I started to understand, what collateral damage really means. And how it is impossible to avoid them in an urban war setting, like in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Sure, I grew up on those games and have thousands of hours in the Total War series. You can learn some general principles from games because it illustrates them pretty well. But they are also fundamentally distant from reality because they cannot simulate anything like the real dynamics and physical characteristics of historic and current-day combat. Even micro things like how human beings move or communicate tends to be profoundly different in real life despite the visual fidelity games are sometimes capable of.
Von Clausewitz's On War isn't a bad place to start. It goes from theory to strategy down to some place in between strategy and tactics. I think he planned to go further but died before completion. Of course it might have been mostly irrelevant 150 years later where there have been advancements in both military doctrine and technology that significantly shape modern tactics. But, absent a modern military thinker on his level, he's a good source. (Though he had his critics too, and I simply don't know enough about the landscape of modern military geniuses < 50 years past to recommend someone better)
Here's an Amazon listing to give you a quick overview but it's old enough to get free copies.
Delightful read, as usual from Mr. Devereaux. However this is an Earth historian analysis vs. an unnamed world which has magic, elves, immortals, dragons and so on. Pretty sure it doesn't apply. I'll take Tolkien's description as being 100% accurate due to those reasons.
I might have missed something but it seemed to me that the author neither stated nor implied that Tolkien was in any way inaccurate. He praises the writing, illustrating how Theoden's,Saruman's and the others' actions made sense in the context of the situation and their own level of expertise as military commanders.
Yes, most of the faults he raises are in where Peter Jackson's movies diverged from the books. Tolkien, he repeatedly says, had an excellent grasp of the calculus and rationale of war. And to the GP's point, most of the realities of war, as long as we are dealing with biological entities in earth-like conditions, apply. Movement of troops, logistics, centers of power, etc apply as much to Middle-Earth (don't know why they referred to an "unnamed world") as they do to ours, as long as armies are relevant. The siege of Helm's Deep is a case where the armies are explicitly relevant.
> second most hard-done-by character in the adaptation for being left out, after only Glorfindel-of-freakin-Gondolin who chivalrously lends Arwen his superstar appearance
61 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadToo many writers either don't have the discipline or don't care about plot holes, which are often the size of moons. (I am looking at you, Star Trek)
The is a pretty big difference how Douglas Adams writes and how Charlie Stross write. Both are great but very different world building.
People who care about plot holes and internal consistency are the exception, rather than the norm.
I am looking for verisimilitude, so I am always asking myself if characters' actions make sense, consistency in the rules, and so forth. There has to be a kind of internal logic a story follows, even if characters constantly make stupid decision.
Most stories failed that test because writers don't care.
Here's an example: There are magic carpet everywhere that can fly, and yet nothing changed about the worldbuilding. People just drive cars and do all the modern things people do, except sometime you can see magic carpets showing up.
Pretty sure it's a different Glorfindel, as the original died in battle slaying a Balrog shortly after the fall of Gondolin.
Edit: against->slaying
There is, for example, a remark in The Silmarillion that "Finrod walks with Finarfin his father beneath the trees in Eldamar". Finrod was killed in Sauron's captivity in Middle Earth.
The Kinslaying was considered a great crime, though, which indicates that the murdered Teleri could not be just simply brought back to life en masse.
(Article is from 2020...OTOH, the article is hardly about 2020 situations or events.)
Also you can go into more technical detail in a book than you can in a film, and maybe detail wasn't important to the plot of the Martian, but I felt book-Mark's desperation a lot more clearly because of how difficult it would be for me to be clear-headed enough to think through everything that was necessary to stay alive.
(LOTR-style world building seems orthogonal to plausible portrayals of military operations. If a kitchen scene in a TV sitcom showed a stuffed turkey getting cooked faster than some breakfast cereal got mushy in milk...would you need any backstory to say "a stupid mistake, or a running gag, or satire"?)
>I think there’s one question left to be answered here, and that’s why Peter Jackson? Why? And I think we can answer this question, because while Jackson’s arrangement makes about no military sense at all, in terms of film construction, it makes a lot of sense.
< problems listed and explained here >
>So while mashing the operational context of this sequence into unrecognizable mush saddens me, I have to say I honestly cannot see a better way to do it while still resolving these problems, keeping in mind the strict restrictions on screentime (which makes adding an Edoras-Éowyn B-plot – technically a C-plot, since this is the B-plot to Frodo’s A-plot – effectively impossible). Alas that it came at the cost of my beloved logistics studies, but as far as sins of adaptation go, this one is a reasonable and necessary evil.
Hence my "stick to books" (and certain magazines, and web sites like HN, and ...) conclusion.
https://www.biblio.com/book/two-centuries-warfare-christophe...
Does anyone here know a book dedicated to these topics? I always wanted to pick a "military textbook" (assuming such a thing exists), apply its lessons to Age of Empires, and see how far that gets me.
Now that I am searching - he does use the operations level mainly to make fun of books, series and movies where his historical examples have more sources.
[1] https://acoup.blog/tag/operations/
Mainly, because in real war, troop morale is a main factor - and the best war tactics are those, that crush the enemies spirit and not their bones.
This is a main quote from Sun Tzu(from the back of my head): if you manage to route the enemy forces in panic, you gain more, than slaughtering them all.
Because they will spread the fear of your troops themself.
(but this part is not captured well in total war, as there you gain indeed benefits from high body count and enemy troops remain the same fighting spirit, even if they ran away in terror all the battles before)
Also where he says that great victories seem obvious and seamless because of great preparations of the leader -- like lifting a hare doesn't seem a great feat of strenght.
But the stuff about tactics is also very good, though on second thought when to attack and when not to, strength ratio and forces positioning probably is more about strategy than tactics.
Also about the political ends and not just the military, even though he says when the decision to go to war the political lord should not interfere with the decision of his general is usually turned on its head a lot and people often forget that war should not be an end in itself and the military should not get more power than the political and ultimate strategy is not about the military.
War was the worst outcome in the day of Sun Tzu as much as today and overall people were much worse after a war(except for a very small minority)-- like the people who think US should have kept the Vietnam war going, or that WW1 Germany military was betrayed, or USSR should have hept on fighting the Cold War and so on.
If you can rout the enemy force in TW, it then becomes massively easier to destroy them completely. Soldiers that are running away can't do much damage to their pursuers. As soon as you turn your back on your enemy, your chances of being killed increase dramatically.
If you rout your enemy in TW, you are offered the choice to accept a victory, or to continue fighting. Unless I'm bored, I always run them down; I don't want them retrained and reinforced, to come back later with added experience points.
In Napoleon TW, the best units for running down routed enemy troops are light cavalry. I suspect that's what lancers were really for.
But my point was, that in the next battle all those troops that ran away are fully restored, so yes the winning tactic is to have light cavalery to chase them down, (which is what they were used for in real life, too.)
So Sun Tzus advice to sometimes let the enemy run away on purpose, so their fear infects other enemy troops for easier future battles - is not captured.
Is that not modeled in that game, or is the effect so small that it doesn’t make a large enough difference?
But those are hardcoded algorithms.
The units do not really learn. (that would be awesome, but is very very hard to implement in realtime in a proper way) They just improve their stats with experience. So they get stronger in stats in either case, even when fleeing every single battle.
A classic textbook about strategy is "The Art of War" by Sun Zhu. It's public domain and pretty short.
Another great books are "The 48 Laws of Power" and "The 33 Strategies of War".
For anything more complex, I recommend you to look into game theory.
If you want a pop sci introduction, Tom Schelling's Strategy of Conflict is great.
It won't help you do any better in strategy games, though.
A big part of the reason for that is that two player games we play for fun like Star Craft are inherently set up as zero sum games. From a game theory point of view, you just minimax and are done. (You might need some randomisation to be optimal.)
The really interesting parts of game theory are non-zero sum games.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tJQsxD34maYw2g5E4/thomas-c-s... for a review.
If you prefer them with commentary, Jocko podcast has talked about some of them.
If you have specific questions about how military units are organized in the modern era, I would really suggest downloading US army manuals on various topics from the era that you want more information about. For example, if you want to learn how US officers were trained to attack a city, download the manual about it, and it talks about what infrastructure to blow up first, how to handle communications, what formations to use, and so on and so forth. It's a lot more direct than reading a conventional history of a war. You can get answers to questions like "how did soldiers learn to move with stealth during the Vietnam war" by reading the manual more efficiently than you can from general histories.
I really recommend reading military material and not trying to glean things from games or fiction. The latter lean heavily on rule of cool versus rule of not dying and killing the other guy more effectively.
It's a bit like knowing the general rules of chess vs. having a specific gambit for use in a particular game. Some of the information in the manuals is common military knowledge, e.g. how convoys work, how to position forces making use of cover, etc. In effect the military laws-of-physics.
What usually remains classified are the detailed Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) associated with given weapon systems or specialist force elements. Also, plans for specific operations are usually 'born secret' and tend to remain classified as that would give away thinking.
They’re quick to leak and near impossible to change once inevitably leaked.
I would assume the hardest part is sustaining the machine that provides the logistics anyway.
Now imagine you want to send military trainers to help build up a friendly nation's military. What are they allowed or not allowed to teach?
It also isn't that hard for other countries to use aerial or satellite surveillance to see what you're doing. Infantry tactics need to be practiced outside. How will you stop other countries from observing your tactics during training exercises?
Very true, but there are still some games, that are more realistic, than others, so you can learn real tactics from them. And I enjoy them more, than the "cool" games, despite having no intentions of ever being close to a real battlefield.
- Operation Flashpoint, a shooter (later Arma) is an example, that is also actually used by some real armies as a training simulation (but in a modified version).
- Close combat series, is a tactical strategy game, where you command small units in WW2. (which can run out of ammunition, or simply run away or surrender, if they are under too much pressure)
- Total War series, for big old school battles, with Units in tight formations against each other.
And about realism and coolness and war: I actually think, all those glorifying Call of Duties etc. for example are really dangerous for the minds of the teens playing it, as they show mainly the glorious side. There are no civilians for example. You can just blow up allmost anything and the game rewards you for it. (mostly)
In those games, I never had a moment, like I had with Operation Flashpoint. In one add on, you fought as the red army against resistance. So people in civilian clothing, but some with guns that want to kill you. And this is what matters, since one bullet can kill you - so you shoot at them. At anything that moves. But after the battle you see, oh. Most of them were really harmless civilians. And you shot them, because you were scared, that they shoot you. There was no glory in that. But it left a deep impression with me and I started to understand, what collateral damage really means. And how it is impossible to avoid them in an urban war setting, like in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Here's an Amazon listing to give you a quick overview but it's old enough to get free copies.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08QDT681F/
https://www.amazon.com/Operations-Operational-Art-Military-D...
Not a Bombadil fan, I see!