Oh... and 4. A lot of these articles got written and published because we published offset litho A5 booklets that need a number of pages divisible by 4. A good half of my own stuff was written to fill those awkward spaces! (The sight and feel of your own magazine just back from the printers, loved it!) And of course we posed as experts, because in those days, by comparison we were. I have had more discussions and arguments fuelled by beer at any number of housecons, cons and meets across the UK. On a side note, Richard Sharp's stuff, especially his later stuff was founded on the collated stats from hundreds of PBM games a vast labour for which this technophobe learned programming and entered up all the game moves, season by season, for many years in the UK.
And to reiterate: it was a different time and game format; using snail mail, telephone, drinking sessions allowed for tactics you don't see now... the wrong envelope trick, the masquerade, the deliver 'agent', the publisher's 'friend'. But thank god (I hope) nothing quite as severe as the player who blackmailed another about exposing his infidelity in return for slavishly following his orders! You must remember that in UK PBM games, the Autumn orders had conditional retreats and builds with them, Spring conditional retreats so it was a 2 season year. The USA had a 3 season year with builds taken out because the poor dears couldn't cope with that degree of conditionality! So the way the game was played had structural differences.