Eaglewood wrote:Ouch. Not a pretty picture, Ghost.
I'd like to give you a hypothetical situation based on this "superior firepower versus brains" debate.
Given: Aztecs versus Cortez and his 1,000 Spanish troops.
We know how history turned out. But.... what if things were done a little differently?
The Aztecs don't have guns or cannons, while Cortez and his men has their technology and guns.
Suppose I was an Aztec general.
I would set up an ambush. I'd send several dozen Aztec warriors to engage Cortez's army. I'll wait in the forest, or a mountain pass.
When my Aztec warriors lure the Spanish towards the forest... they'd fall for the pit-traps with spikes... or in the mountains, the Spanish would fall into a rockslide trap.
This could whittle down the Spanish numbers to, say, 600 or 700.
I'd use hit and run tactics. I'd use blowguns or throwing javelins, and have these warriors hide in trees or behind obstacles, afer the traps.
Every time Cortez loses a man, his army is weakened because he cannot recieve reinforcements unless there's teleporters or some advanced sci-fi tech to bypass the 1 - 3 month sailing journey from Spain to South America. Besides, Cortez burned his ships to motivate his men.
Also, every round of ammunition the Spanish wastes on my hundreds or thousands of Aztec troops, means eventually they'll run out of bullets and "high tech" to use aganist me. Same goes for energy cells for energy weapons.
While I have spears, javelins, blowguns, etc. that can easily be replaced.
I'll keep having my warriors conduct "alpha strike" with javelins and whatever, to attempt to seriously or mortally wound more and more of Cortez's soldiers.
That is one of my ideas how to take down a superior invading force with "primitive" technology.
Then again, the Vong might not operate as Humans do pyschologically to traps and what-not.
There are, however, more difficulties faced by the Aztecs. The most important was that their empire was an actual empire, based on the military subjugation of nations/tribes. The conquerors of Mexico had access to numerous native auxiliaries, military forces provided by various disaffected groups that hoped to profit from kicking the Aztecs from their position of prominence. Perhaps the conquered peoples that had not been fully assimilated were sufficiently tired of sending tithes of their populations to have their hearts ritually sawn out of their chests with obsidian knives, or to have their skins flayed off their living bodies to be worn as a ritual second skin by the statues of gods. Or they just got tired of paying taxes.
The situation the Spaniards found themselves up against is a classic example of divide and conquer. The Spaniards found allies willing to provide local troops capable of fighting in the local manner. The Spaniards had horses, which proved a morale-buster for the Aztecs. The Spaniards had loud, flashy weapons. In battle, the Spaniards focused their efforts on killing their opponents, whereas the Aztecs focused their efforts on capturing their opponents injured but alive to be used as sacrifices. Combine all that with the suicidal religiously-founded confusion of the Aztec leadership, allowing the Spaniards into the Aztec capital and into direct contact with the Aztec leadership, and the Aztecs managed to very deliberately stack the deck against themselves.
Also, the areas in which the Spaniards fought were dominated by scrub and very light forest, exactly the kind of terrain the Spaniards in question had previously fought the Moors in.
As for the Borg, there just appears to be no conceivable way in which they could successfully engage any substantial force that has access to weaponry, transport and defenses equivalent to Star Wars technologies. I suspect that even the Corporate Sector Authority's picket fleet should be able to fight the Borg to a standstill.
Now, if the Borg were to specialize their cubes...
A screen of cubes devoted entirely to shields and armor, to the exclusion of anything else but antifighter weapons and engines, might then form a short-lived screening force. The screening force would then be followed by waves of cubes set up strictly as bombs, interspersed with a sprinkling of conventional cubes to fend off fighter screens.
Of course, there's still the matter of overwhelming Star Wars tech advantages in the areas of firepower and protection, not to mention vastly faster FTL travel speeds that allow forces to be concentrated and dispersed at will.
I always like a challenge, attempting to take down a stronger enemy with a weaker force or economy. Where's the fun in strategy games when you're the big bad boy / wolf on the block and just kill everything in sight? Or just bash everything down that angers or annoys you?
