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0 pointsAcerbicZero8y ago0 comments

Agreed. Trying to compare generals from ~10 different centuries without taking into account the specifics of each campaign, and context of those campaigns renders the results useless.

I wouldn't trust this model to compare Montgomery to Patton during the Sicily invasion, let alone compare Caesar to Napoleon.

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ethbro8y ago

One thing I would be curious at generating from this data set, given the historical period spanning, would be correlation between expected battle outcome & actual battle outcome.

As someone who picked up a computational military modeling course in college, attempting to model ancient warfar is a vastly different task than modern battles.

My gut would be that modern warfare de-correlates more strongly from numeric advantage due to increased speed and lethality of available force types.

Also, for the author, if you wanted to be more accurate, start calculating actual expected outcomes from the forces. Lanchester's Laws are as good a place as any to start.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

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