Unibot III wrote:This suffers very badly from largely preparing people how to invade and not focusing on any specifics about how to liberate or run a defense - the underlying language of the text assumes you're "targeting" or occupying or "destroying" regions. It also severely complicates the military gameplay experience - it's not approaching it right. It lists things in a non-intuitive order and plunks it down for people to interpret. When you teach someone how to run a mission, you start with the generalities and you work to the specifics.
I think it would benefit from an author who ... ahem, defends and liberates.
I also have to disagree with Sedgistan - the text as it is is already stuffed full of unnecessary ramblings of gameplay philosophy (like the atrocious section about how RPers should just go play ball somewhere else and how Gameplay is "necessary"). A guide really isn't the place for philosophy and at the very least it should be labelled that those sections reflect the opinion of the author - they certainly don't reflect the opinion of half of Gameplay.
Well, to be honest, I was trying to avoid completely rewriting a new guide and adapted it from my raiding guide I wrote awhile back.
I agree with you (for the most part), and will be working on reworking each chapter this week, completely from scratch- that seems to be the only way to fix the underlying problems, and it's what I should have done in the first place.
Just to clarify, are there any specific points you wish to add on the topic of liberations or defending, or would you just rather I make a completely separate chapter for it?
And raiding since the API started including the regional update order is something that I barely got a taste of while playing; your 
But I think a separate, detailed how-to guide in the way you've written sections IV, V, the second half of VI, and VII through X (especially VII!) would also be incredibly valuable - and less work for you in terms of rewriting and organization. It would also let prospective readers decide how much detail they really wanted - so people who just want to know what all these R/D people are talking about can skim through the Basics thread and be done, and all the questions about current "best practices" in military gameplay could come here. Treating it as a "how-to" might also deal with some of the criticisms about this being one-sided. Instead of trying to balance the rhetoric, you could simply write different sections on how to run a raid, how to run a tagging operation, etc., and then you or someone else (e.g., an interested defender) could write other sections on how to run a defense, how to run a liberation, etc.
