frandroid

I'll go ahead and overanalyze this in its entirety...First, I would need to know when I would be killing them. Arguably, many crucial cogs (as you would say, small) could prove to be easily replaceable in history - so killing them at birth might have little impact on the trajectory of the future. However, killing them at the peak of their relevance would open up a can of worms of speculation as to who would replace them - or if anyone would replace them to equal effect. Second, the further back in history you go the more inscrutable individual roles become, and the higher likelihood that the historiographic depiction of different events or people is less than accurate.

With that, my immediate reaction upon reading the rules of the game was Claude Etienne Minié. His invention (the Minie ball bullet-variant) signaled a turning point in military strategy, the scale and devastation of war and the volume of casualties in any armed conflict. Such a subtle delay in the development of high efficiency ammunition could have the effect of slowing military advancement nearer to the rate of social and industrial development.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more bullshit my answer sounds.