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The next rounds in the fight will be with the following results:
15 - 3 (gray fire)
15 - 2 (green fire)
13 - 2 (gray fire)
13 - 1 (green fire)
12 - 1 (gray fire)
... And the greens fire, destroy the last gray tank, and win!
So - quantity is better, isn't it?
Remember that we started with an advantage of 4:1 for quantity,
against 10:1 for quality, and anyway quantity won...
OK - I thought a bit about this, and the demonstration didn't
convince me. So why didn't it convince me?
1. The simulation is way too simple. How do we define quality?
- For example, if the high quality tanks are also faster, they
could run in, hit, and escape; once and again, and get victory
without even a single loss.
2. Even if we limit the simulation to the simple rules we started
with, there are still a lot of questions. How do we know that
on each round, the low quality tanks knock a quantity of tanks
equal to one tenth of their number? That would need a perfect
synchronization of all the small tanks, so they would all fire
at the same (big quality) tanks. If that was NOT the case, the
second round would end, not 30 - 7, but maybe 30 - 10, with all
the high quality tanks hit, but not destroyed...
3. Then again, you could say that a hit (hi-quality) tank would
have a somewhat poorer performance than a "new" one,
so we could have to complicate the simulation further...
4. In my opinion - there isn't a simple answer to this question.
But it is interesting enough, so I have put one simulation in
the games section. Go check it!.
5. I talked shortly about this issue with some people in DIV'
s chat room, and Lukas (Adherbal) correctly pointed out that terrain
is also a big factor to be considered. By the way, the graphics
of the tanks in the pictures were addapted from original graphics
from Adherbal's WWII game - so here is the credit he deserves.
6. Final note about simulation - I don't think that taking things
to the extreme is good. You could say that 1,000,000 tanks will
surely win over 10 super-tanks, but I would like to know how that
million tanks will be all together within range of fire of the
hi-quality tanks. On the other hand, a hi quality tank that fires,
for example, neutron bombs that vaporize 1,000 tanks each shot,
is also highly improbable. The question of quality / quantity
is interesting within the limits of reality and common sense...
And to finish, let me put here some thoughts about real conflicts
of the late time:
1) World War II - Quantity won, in my opinion (and of many others).
"From 1939 to 1945, German's military machine struck out
and conquered most of Western Europe... In time, however, the
Allies gathered strength and eventually crushed the German Army
and Axis powers with a display of brute force that has remained
unmatched to this day. What started out as a war based on military
tactics and blitzkriegs, later became a war reliant on industry
and mass production" (from SSI's Steel Panthers manual -
one of the best tank battle simulators for WWII).
It is widely known that German engineers and scientists were
way ahead of the allies during WWII. Some of their inventions
were misused (a typical example is the fate of the ME 262, that
could have been an excellent fighter but was misused as a bomber),
but for me, the final result of the war was inevitable. In no
way could the Germans win against the huge mass of resources that
(mainly the US and the URSS) put in the field against them...
2) Desert Storm - Quality shone... Iraqi officials have said
that this was not a fair war... Their tanks exploded without them
having the opportunity of seeing who was firing at all...
3) The Cold War - USA against the URSS - Again a victory for
quality... This was, by the way, a widespread controversia within
the US, for the US invested billions of dollars in high quality
hardware, in the same time that the URSS mass produced lesser
quality armament. The Warsaw nations' planes and tanks outnumbered
the NATO forces by large. There was not a "real" war
on the ground, but in my opinion, quality won in this case.
4) Middle East late wars - Again a victory for quality. One of
the extreme cases was the 1982 Lebanon war, during which the Israeli
Air Force destroyed more than 100 Syrian planes without even a
single loss...
So - there is not a simple answer for this question... But it's
an interesting issue anyway - What do you think?
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