EVE General Discussion

And then read the Manifesto because damn, open your eyes to (the alternatives to) capitalism.

As for the OP, Sun Tzu gives you some really vague concepts of war which, while many are still applicable to modern warfare (men in a corner will fight to the death, nothing truly destroyed can ever come again), cannot really be applied for an army composed of free-thinking undisciplined immortal neckbeards wielding the powers of satan and mom's basement.

Anything to do with propaganda and motivation.

Even winning fights is only useful insofar as it motivates people to show up for the next one. Dominion mechanics means that your only goal is to completely overpower your enemy on 1-3 timers, and they'll never get the momentum back to challenge you again. Everything else is just maneuvering for those few decisive timers. For those brave few organizations you can try and delay the sov grind long enough for the enemy coalition to collapse on itself, but very few organizations can stand the geurilla playstyle and watching their precious sanctums burn.

I'm not well read in the area, but my guess would be late 20th century revolutionary texts.

Deadpool comics will give ou a good idea of an EVE player.

It's one of those books I keep telling myself I will read one day. But I have a stack of books to read that is too high! I am half way through "The Great Karate Myth" and "A Brief History of Time", but I am re-reading the Java Certified Programming books (1 through 3) and then I need to read "The Folly of Reason" and "Algorithms & Data Structures"... and then the Ian Banks books... then I have a biography of Nikola Tesla, that I have been meaning to read... hmm.. I should put that one forward in the list really.

I will probably never get to read The Art of War.

Reminds me of online poker a bit. If you play with "fake money", the rules of playing a decent game no longer apply. Nobody walks into a Vegas casino and goes all in every time. they do it all the Time on the internets. Then again Cris Moneymaker won WSOP being trained off of an irc bot.

But there are a lot of parallels (Art of War) as Eve tends to also have a lot of real money and time invested by many, as opposed to all the free cash you want (zynga etc...). Especially the part about laying siege Relates to POS bashing very well IMHO. I.E. a huge PITA.

this is the best sun tsu

Please send me all your stuff so that I may liberate the proletariat, brother.

Not empty quoting.

There is a more modern Chinese text than Sun Tzu called Thick Black Theory. A particularly unfortunate translation really. The title in Chinese is something more like 'thick skin(face), black heart'.

There are some cheesy acquisitions of it and an ebook that has both the text and some pretty specific charts synopsizing the text. It is full of all the colorful names for strategies, but when you look at them they are very practical, and have nothing to do with the pre-modern era glorification of war.

The Classical Chinese texts differ from Eurocentric text in several ways. Whereas Leibniz and Newton want to argue about who came up with the Calculus first, the classical Chinese approach is to claim the thing was said by some ancient and then comment on it. Very little of Sun Tzu is actually Sun Tzu. Most of it is the commentaries. There are also some Chinese strategic predecessors to Su Tzu who have some of this, but not as much. Here is an example:

Allies

To operate, the armed forces need allies as consultants and assistants to the leadership.
Everyone looks up to those who are thoughtful and have unusual strategies beyond the ordinary ken, who are widely learned and have broad vision, and who have many skills and great talents. Such people can be made top allies.
Those who are fierce, swift, firm, and sharp are heroes of an age. Such people can be made second-ranked allies.
Those who talk a lot but not always to the point, who are slight in ability, with little that is extraordinary, are people with ordinary capabilities. They can be brought along as the lower class of allies.
(The Way of the General, Zhuge Liang, trans. Thomas Cleary)

Also, if historical accounts are to be believed Mao actively and practically applied Sun Tzu in some extreme ways.