Which side has an advantage?

[kapowsin]

It would be interesting to see stats on if the AI played itself 100 times, the win % for each side. If the game was perfectly balanced it would be close 50-50 but that would probably be hard to achieve. My feel is that it is pretty well balanced but it'd be interesting to see the numbers. Or even the human win/loss as each side in the different scenarios...

Also, I'm curious how the engine works. Does it search moves in a tree at all? That seems like it would be difficult to create a machine that could think more than a few ply (turns) deep because of the unpredictability of combat outcomes. I wonder if there are aspects of chess engines that could be carried over to games like this to make a stronger faster AI?

One other note is that it would be interesting to be able to see how the AI evaluates the position... (whether it thinks its winning, losing etc.)

[s_nkarp]

We do have runs with all the AI's playing each other - they have different strategies, so it's not consistent which side wins.

Campaigns between humans (through GC) it's 50.5% Axis, 46.8% Soviet (balance: tie).

Typhoon is 50% Soviet, 40% Axis, 10% tie.

Note that we have no way to efficiently distinguish games played to completion from those resigned in the middle, so take those results with a grain of salt...

The AI generals with medals do use a tree-search, modified to address incredibly rapid branching, stochastic factors, and things like breakthrough. Even going a move or two ahead helps a lot -- we're not trying to win tournaments, just to give good players a good game!