Ender's Game

[Thayus]

Go read the book again. Ender directly assaults the homeworld of the bugs, and they don't fire a single shot at his ships. They even open a way for him to blow up the planet.

The bugs wich also had completely given up on conquering Earth and were actually busy building temples to Ender the doombringer. Yes, very threatening indeed.

Of course, it's ovbious nobody's gonna convice you otherwise. A mind etched in nothing, since it's clear by now you created your own ideal version of the story that's completely separated from the book. Good day sir!

I'm afraid I'm going to have to call bulls**t on you.

As for his own fleet, it consisted of twenty starships, each with only four fighters.
He knew the four-fighter starships they were old-fashioned, sluggish, and the
range of their Little Doctors was half that of the newer ones. Eighty fighters,
against at least five thousand, perhaps ten thousand enemy ships.

Ender realizes that what he really wants is to stop playing, and so . . .

In that final battle in Battle School, he had won by ignoring the enemy, ignoring
his own losses; he had moved against the enemy's gate.

And the enemy's gate was down.

If I break this rule, they'll never let me be a commander. It would be too
dangerous. I'll never have to play a game again. And that is victory.

He whispered quickly into the microphone. His commanders took their parts of
the fleet and grouped themselves into a thick projectile, a cylinder aimed at the
nearest of the enemy formations. The enemy, far from trying to repel him,
welcomed him in, so he could be thoroughly entrapped before they destroyed
him. Mazer is at least taking into account the fact that by now they would have
learned to respect me. thought Ender. And that does buy me time.

Ender dodged downward, north, east, and down again, not seeming to follow
any plan, but always ending up a little closer to the enemy planet. Finally the
enemy began to close in on him too tightly. Then, suddenly, Ender's formation
burst. His fleet seemed to melt into chaos. The eighty fighters seemed to follow
no plan at all, firing at enemy ships at random, working their way into hopeless
individual paths among the bugger craft.

After a few minutes of battle, however, Ender whispered to his squadron leaders
once more, and suddenly a dozen of the remaining fighters formed again into a
formation. But now they were on the far side of one of the enemy's most
formidable groups; they had, with terrible losses, passed through and now they
had covered more than half the distance to the enemy's planet.

The enemy sees now, thought Ender. Surely Mazer sees what I'm doing.
Or perhaps Mazer cannot believe that I would do it. Well so much the better for
me.

Ender's tiny fleet darted this way and that, sending two or three fighters out as if
to attack, then bringing them back. The enemy closed in, drawing in ships and
formations that had been widely scattered, bringing them in for the kill. The
enemy was most concentrated beyond Ender, so he could not escape back into
open space, closing him in. Excellent, thought Ender. Closer. Come closer.

Then he whispered a command and the ships dropped like rocks toward the
planet's surface. They were starships and fighters, completely unequipped to
handle the heat of passage through an atmosphere. But Ender never intended
them to reach the atmosphere. Almost from the moment they began to drop, they
were focusing their Little Doctors on one thing only. The planet itself.

One, two, four, seven of his fighters were blown away. It was all a gamble now,
whether any of his ships would survive long enough to get in range. It would not
take long, once they could focus on the planet's surface. Just a moment with Dr,
Device, that's all I want. It occurred to Ender that perhaps the computer wasn't
even equipped to show what would happen to a planet if the Little Doctor
attacked it. What will I do then, shout Bang, you're dead?

Ender took his hands off the controls and leaned in to watch what happened.
The perspective was close to the enemy planet now, as the ship hurtled into its
well of gravity. Surely it's in range now, thought Ender. It must be in range and
the computer can't handle it.

Then the surface of the planet, which filled half the simulator field now, began to
bubble; there was a gout ot explosion, hurling debris out toward Ender's fighters.
Ender tried to imagine what was happening inside the planet. The field growing
and growing, the molecules bursting apart but finding nowhere for the separate
atoms to go.

Out of 80 fighters, 12 manage to survive to get into position to make a run on the planet, and no more than 5 are able to get within firing range. The enemy did not, as you say, let him through unopposed.

Now, granted, in the latest book Card retconned the hidden Hive Queen into being the primary choice rather than a desperate backup, but that's not how it was originally.

-Thayus