Strategies for Intentional Communities
Having already written on the relationship web an intentional community (IC) will likely find itself embedded in, it is now time to turn to strategies. John Boyd argued that the goal of strategy is to keep your enemy politically isolated. What you seek to do is impose action costs on your enemies. I remember playing as a child and young adult the John Tiller Campaign Series of games: West Front, East Front, Rising Sun etc. This was an early version of a digitized table top game set in World War 2. Each unit had a pool of action points totaling up to 100 Action Points (AP). To fire a weapon, load a passenger, unload a passenger, traverse terrain etc. had an action point cost. For example, moving through rough terrain imposed a higher cost of movement than did traversing a plains hex. If you were on the defense you would obviously seek hexes that were rough terrain that among other things imposed a hefty movement cost on enemy units, which in turn limited their ability to fire on you. This concept, taken from table top games, is useful in analyzing real life; after all, the Prussians invented table top games to simulate war. Your goal in any competitive endeavor is to impose action costs onto your foes so that they are able to act less and less. Another related concept from games is action economy; an important concept in both card games and turn based strategy games. Your goal is to, given the limited amount of actions you can take, be as efficient with them as possible; while at the same time imposing costs to action on your foe. This is always referred to as out tempoing your opponent.
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