Tactical combat, strategic battles, and making wars epic

Large scale battles are common in fantasy and science fiction. The methods may vary, but the basic idea of winning by using tactics and strategy is pretty even. Really, the only question is how much detail to go into. When I read tactical analysis of past wars, even those rarely go into blow-by-blow strategy and instead focus on the overall battle plans. It seems to me that tactics only come to light on the grand scale, rather than at the individual level.

For a movie and book, battle is a very visual idea. Most people who enjoy the story haven't had any kind of touch with actual battle, so it's a great deal of imagination and hardly any known fact of the situation. I'm sure combat in its true form isn't romantic, and probably resembles a horror story more than anything else. Either way, a lot of speculation goes into it. Done well, the audience has a good grasp of who's winning and why.

In the end, what matters is that the audience gets involved in caring about what's happening. Given a grasp of the strategy, the audience will leap ahead and enjoy the resolution much more than without such a head start. Epic combat grows out of this idea but takes a grander design, with far more consequence to the world at large, or with deep meaning to the main characters. Given a wide enough tactical overview, any battle can become epic. Think of the 300 at Thermopylae--I'm sure most people know it now because of the movie--and how incredibly impactful that event was. That is epic.

- M