[tomc]

As long as you're gathering questions...

What can they tell us about how they bridge the gap between strategy and tactics? How does the system plan its strategy for a given (or previously unseen!) scenario? How does it know to hold this town, abandon this outpost, or make a swift strike up a particular road to catch the enemy out of position?

The simplest approach is to ignore strategy, and min/max (A/B tree, whatever) for as many future turns as resources allow. Not too satisfying in the long run, but very flexible.

Built-in heuristics could be made to work really well for predefined scenarios, but may not be very adaptable to user made scenarios.

There could be a layer of static analysis at the start of the scenario, which produces an abstracted view from which it devises a strategy. This could be run again during the game to adapt and refine the system's objectives, as long as it doesn't switch back and forth between goals (analysis paralysis!) so often as to be ineffective.

Anyhow, the "how to do" (tactical) problems are solvable in a variety of ways, but how are they approaching the "what to do" (strategical) issue?

I'm looking forward to the game, and thanks for posting here.