Battle Styles

One may find different styles of battle and disagreements over when to use which; total war types may clash with someone who expects a honorable duel. To the total war type sneak attacks, picking off the weak, disrupting supply chains, and other such dastardly deeds are all cromulent. These activities of course are "not sporting", dishonorable, etc. to the dueler, especially if that person went in expecting a fair fight. Some art of war something battle on terms best for you.

Professionals may thus tend to steamroll those who rely on a cult of personality or "softer" battle skills. See for example the Roman Army meatgrinder as opposed to Alexander the Great leading a charge, which of course is a totally hypothetical matchup.

Alexander was brilliant in battle, but likely would have fared poorly against the Romans, and anyways Alexander's Empire fell apart right quick. He was a glass cannon. The Romans? They were churning out legions and generals and training them all. Warlords may suffer a similar fate, the type that is invincible in battle, at least until they run into troops who do such things as to not panic and take the time to aim. In gaming terms the professionals are the ones who have understood and trained on the relevant systems, and thus may know "tricks" that typically cause all sorts of outrage in local after someone gets blowed up, especially from those either not expecting combat (hey, you undocked…) or expecting honor in battle.

A professional, instead of raging in local, would instead say something like "ho! I knew not such a trick existed!" and figure out when to use it (or how to avoid it). "Spice and Wolf" does this as well, but for marketing and not gaming systems. War by other means…

In EVE Online one trick is the cloaky Sabre on gate thing, reputedly invented by some Morsus Mihi players† who were wondering whether they could do anything about all the cloaky ships getting through their gatecamps. It turned out, yes, there was something that could be done. Hard to pull off (or I was never the best of Sabre pilots) but the target at zero velocity in a bubble with a Sabre charging it down after it saw an empty gate and hit warp can be pretty surprising.

Another trick is simply to understand that the reaction time of a lot of players is… bad. To a professional, ten seconds is something like eternity: five seconds to burn the decloak timer, another few seconds for the target lock, then a tick or two for the sentry drones to spool up. Plenty of time for someone to simply warp off, cloak up,‡ or burn out of range. Their somewhat less skilled opponent, meanwhile, is starting to wonder what all the noises were and why they are now in a pod. You looked the pilot up on zkillboard and discovered that you have urgent appointments elsewhere, right?

P.S. Total war types overlap to some degree with pirates and other such profit-oriented mercenaries, a difference in emphasis, perhaps. "Carthago delenda est" may very well profit the victor, while a pirate who makes a profit is unlikely to bemoan that Carthage got itself destroyed in the process. A prudent pirate would better know when to cut their losses (allowing for variances in risk-taking, luck, etc), a step that may be more difficult for a total war type attached to some ideology or the other. Pirates could be lured with hints of profit, just as ideologues have their flaws, so both might be better off if they keep such foibles in mind.

† I have the notion it was Zhoul who claimed that they had invented the technique when camping with other folks (Lithia Tsanov, etc). I'm not sure if that invention was before or after Morsus Mihi imploded, or if I was being told a fib, but that was something said on comms years and years ago, or so I claim. Other players figured the Sabre thing out, probably by watching our camps and reverse engineering what was going on, or independent invention or re-invention of a technique is not unknown.

‡ Note that after you cloak up your ship remains visible for a tick or two and an opponent can "approach" and then max their speed out when their nose starts to drop after the cloak takes effect. A cloaking ship will thus want to be somewhere else, ideally off the line of the attacker, and the attacking ship should watch for a pulse (good Sabre pilots claimed they could sometimes follow these) or at least to stop their ship around about where the cloak happened, MWD burns having a drift of some amount after you hit stop.