Solitaire Wargaming

Destroid said:

Because you will learn all of the AI rules and it will require you to do all the work normally handled by a computer, resulting in a slow (or very simple) game. Even a game as simple as tic tac toe would have quite a lengthy lookup to see what the 'computer' player does.

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Simple games can be fun too as long as they represent something sensible. About slowness - it can be solved by distribution of stuff into accessible cards with tables. And doing stuff that computer does allows to sometimes override the decisions of table/dice while when computer AI does something extremely retarded, you're left with spoiled game. Also, you can modify game AI without any knowledge of programming.

I have bought three small solitaire wargames so far and 2 of them are fun. One is Eindekker and another is Great War Salvo!.
Eindekker is a campaign game where you play a German ace pilot in 1915. Each day you choose/roll a mission (combat patrol, trench patrol and trench support). The campaign lasts 7 days. Each day is divided into 10 turns.
There's a map that is divided in several zones. Each type of mission requires you to fly to a specific zone. For being in that zone on under specific conditions you get victory points. The sum of victory points decides whenever you won the campaign or not.
Each turn you roll for random events ranging from enemy aircrafts and anti-air fire to malfunctions and bad weather.
There's also combat which is mostly roll and stat based with the most important decision being whenever to continue to fight or to flee.
Generally the most important thing in the game is risk management - deciding how long to start in the zone against stuff like a possibility of bad weather stopping you from returning to airfield in time making you crash, damage getting worse and making you crash or destroying the plane, encounters with enemy fighters, etc.
It's a pretty good game.
It makes good use of random event generator throwing interesting situations at the player and AI simply deciding whenever to stay or to flee.

Great War Salvo! is about combat between ships. It abstracts the map away and uses relative ranges between ships. For example there are three ships. One is player ship, second is in short range from the player's ship and third is on long range from the player's ship and on medium range from the second ship.
The AI decision is whenever to close range, offer broadside or withdraw. Which is made by rolling a D6.
It works pretty well too. Though after a few weeks I became bored with the available ships.

The third game was Cold Harbor II and I didn't like it because it's basically a charge towards enemy lines and get slaughtered game which has some rules that don't make sense (for example when you amass 6 units against one enemy units all the 6 units roll for destruction from enemy fire while the amount of firing units doesn't influence the chance of single unit getting destroyed.)

Destroid said:

Some dungeon crawling tabletop games can be played solitary, but they are 1) not very good games, and 2) the monster AI is as simple as move towards player -> attack.

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I think it's mainly because they don't have good ideas for what a monster could do. They lack imagination.

AI (artificial intelligence) is not the same as AH (artificially human). AI is used all the time in situations where the goal is to AVOID being AH.

But in the AI forums, its a common joke that the problem with AI in games is the I part. Just as one example, a true AI moves across the map with "the shortest distance is a straight line" and just moving around obstacles. But players want AH. They want the opponent to sometimes go straight, sometimes flank, sometimes around the back, and sometimes to even do something stupid because it might work by surprise.

AI programmers consider it a funny comment about the human race that to go from AI to AH requires dumping some of the intelligence to make room for random.