That's incorrect. All tactical thought is about the appropriate use of units to use their full potentialities and achieve victory. You can lose by using too many units, as well as too few.
Not tactically. Perhaps on a strategic level. Leaving that aside, however, in the end all tactics devolve into methods for creating a superiority of force. Only the method differs. Some are positive (literal concentration), some are negative (like decoying the enemy out of posistion), some involve posistioning (flanking), some involve simply doing things in such a way that your opponent cannot bring his force to bear (manuver warfare), but the end purpose of all of them is to be able to bring more weapons to bear at the critical point then the other guy. Clauswitz describes war "as an act of force"; he is quite correct. Applying the force intelligently is still applying the force.
FreeSpace portrays limited battlefield engagements. Only a few ships engage at a time in a mission, rather than having a continuing rolling theatre of war. It's inherently mission based, rather than a continuing battlezone. Several smaller missions can portrary a BIG mission more effectively than one battle royale.
Explain how, then. This is something you've quite consistantly failed to actually do. And FS engagements are not limited, they are miniscule.
Alternatively, you could argue that the Shivan logistical target was the core supply depots and capitals of their enemies -- the systems of Vasuda and Sol.
You misunderstand me.Leaving aside the fogged definition attempt, as frankly there's nothing of use to either of us there and it merely constitutes a case of
argumentum ad vericundum or perhaps just trying to confuse with large words (don't bother, I've read quite a bit more on such subjects then I suspect you have), there is no commander in the world who will not be happy given more forces to accomplish his objective. How well he uses them is a different subject entirely, this is true, but they make it easier, simpler, to accomplish. What I said closing my first paragraph still holds true.
Regardless of whether specific tactics were invalidated by subspace, subspace creates as many dangers as opportunities. If you attempted to engage a fleet with everything you had, that risked the enemy fleet warping through subspace elsewhere that would then be completely unprotected. In my mind, those factors mitigate against fully deploying your entire fleet in one massive battle -- because the enemy might leave and strike somewhere else while you mass forces. While the nodes create choke points between each system, subspace travel makes the logistics of getting everyone to the same gate difficult since each fleet (and their supplies) also must travel through the node network.
And Fredrick the Great said that "he who defends everything, defends nothing." If you spread out as you say, what is there to keep your enemy from picking you off piecemeal with their own concentrated force? The great power of the subspace drive is that it allows forces to be pulled together or spread apart nearly instantly; intersystem jumps are, after all, nearly instantenous. And as I have observed before to others, just how many targets are there for them to attack? A few installations perhaps. Inhabited worlds (although this is questionable for FS1 prior to the Lucifer, and even then, the Shivans seem to care little about them). Nodes into and out of the system. There really aren't that many things worth defending, and if you looked, the majority of them in any given situation are probably your own warships! (Which makes spreading them thin even
more incomprehensible.) The subspace drive revoked the concept of battle lines just as it revoked the stranglehold of the carrier by taking away its ability to keep its opponents at arm's length. Space is furthermore vast, and it is safe to assume that the majority of engagements fought in either FreeSpace are bushwhacks to some extent or another, wherein one side, probably the defenders, had their ships dispersed into interplanetary space and running quiet to protect them. Otherwise, there's really no reason for them to be fought where they are.
I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make with the choke points. We all played King's Gambit, so it's of course true (although King's Gambit makes it sound like there were other entry points to Gamma Drac, oddly enough). By the same token, however, we also know just how quickly ships can move through nodes. Never once have they posed a logistical problem by their mere existence; this is facetious and absolutely not borne out by anything mentioned in any game. The problems come when you can't protect your traffic through them.
And speaking of
argumentum ad vericundum, you're at it again with the repeated linking of the subspace article (which I helped write), to no good purpose. I'm sure it helps your argument
look more authorative, but what it really does, I don't know.