Starmada Sunday Retrospective: Starmada as War

After responding to a comment on my last post about Admiralty Edition, I spent a little time reflecting on our Starmada experience and realized that, in the latter days of Admiralty, we achieved Combat as War.  We managed to do sufficient planning in design that we had ameliorated the impact of both tactics and luck.  We (and by we I mean mostly Jared, Matt, and I) were indeed out to win the battle before it began, rather than going for a 'fair fight'.  The only thing we needed, which we tried to achieve but repeatedly failed at, was resource management between battles (because that's how you make iterated Combat as War interesting).