(This post contains very minor spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom).

There’s a classic rule of military analysis1 that observes that the relative strength of two melee units is linear in headcount, but for units with ranged weapons, effective combat strength goes as the square of unit count.

Fundamentally, in hand-to-hand combat, units face off approximately one-on-one and thus the larger force can’t actually bring its additional units to the front. Thus, in each unit of time each force produces comparable output and sustains a comparable number of casualties, but the larger force can last linearly longer.

However, with sufficiently capable ranged weapons, the larger force is able to bring all of its combat power to bear, since all of its units can fire simultaneously. Now, in unit of time, the larger force is producing linearly more output, and also has the same linearly-increased staying power as before.

This law thus provides a principled theoretical basis for my contention that low-cost echoes with ranged capability – such as pigs with boomerangs (once Tri reaches level four) – are the most effective combat summons in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

This post is a spruced-up transcription of a verbal assertion I produced mostly-spontaneously for Kate while she was watching me play Echoes of Wisdom. This is just how my mind works.

  1. As a fun aside, I first learned of these laws from a delightful paper entitled “Human evolution and human history: A complete theory”, which contends that “the ability for humans to kill each other at a distance by use of thrown weapons” provides a basis for understanding all other distinctive aspects of human evolution. ↩︎