Age of Empires and live ants used to test theoretical ideas on combat

Anyone who has played a real-time strategy game probably ponders this question when preparing for a fight: Is it better to have a huge number of relatively weak units or a smaller number of extremely powerful ones?

In the early 1990s, researchers who studied ants argued that finding the right balance between force size and capability depended partly on the environment. Complex environments, they theorized, favored smaller numbers of capable units that could occupy key terrain. Simpler environments, by contrast, would allow massive waves of weak units to Zerg rush https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/zerg-rush/ an outnumbered opponent.

"Environmental complexity does influence the slope of the relationship between group size and group combat ability," the researchers conclude. And that's consistent with the theoretical ideas that were first proposed in the wake of World War I.

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