SOP
Strategic, Operational & Tactical Warfare
Introduction
Understanding the distinctions among strategic, operational, and tactical warfare is important in devising a successful battle plan. However, the distinctions can be a bit fuzzy; there is overlap at each level.
Strategy
Strategic planning deals with the overall objective of the war - in this case, to destroy every enemy unit before being destroyed yourself. Strategy is at the national scale in the real world, which would be analogous to the scale of the whole of the player's units and buildings at the TAS scale. Strategy integrates economic, political, and military forces to achieve the final goal. Strategic goals are those that lead to the ultimate strategic objective: destruction of the enemy. They tend to be general rather than specific: for example, "destroy the enemy's energy generation capacity".
Operational Planning
Operational planning provides a specific means for reaching a strategic goal. Operational planning deals with where, when, and how forces should be employed in order to reach a strategic goal. For example, if the objective is to "destroy the enemy's energy generation capacity," the operational components of this would be to locate the enemy's energy generation buildings, assess the enemy forces available to defend the respective buildings, determine the best route to take to destroy the enemy building with the least enemy resistance, and deploy forces in such a way as to achieve the strategic goal. Operational goals tend to be on a more specific level than strategic ones; strategic goals can be broken down into one or several operational goals. An example of an operational goal may be "destroy the fusion plant at the north of the enemy's base".
Tactics
Tactical planning involves the use of force to best achieve the intermediate steps to the operational goal. Tactics involves where and how to best employ each unit so that its destructive potential is maximized, and the enemy's destructive potential against it and the whole force is minimized. Tactical planning will destroy single enemy defense structures, groups of defense structures, units, and so on. A good example of tactical planning might be "this group of Goliaths will advance and destroy the enemy's Annihilator defending his fusion plant".
Conclusion
Why is it important to understand this? In order to win the game, you must set strategic goals that provide the best way to win. How is the game won? The game is not won on the battlefield; it is won on an economic level. You must set strategic goals in such a way as to maximize your own economic production over the length of the game, and minimize your enemy's. Operational goals allow you to break strategic goals down so that you can act with a sense of purpose; they give a concrete way of determining where, when, and how to use your forces. Tactics allows you to use your units to their maximum potential, thereby increasing the number of units that you can have because the need to replace losses will be less.
-Felix the Cat
