I have little doubt that there is an optimum solution for any side in a scenario. What I mean by optimum is the the solution that gives the greatest chance of victory for a side given that randomised outcomes are in play, unlike chess where each 'combat' event is non random. Eventually in Chess you might end up with a set of solutions that guarantees White (I suspect) to always win or Black to always win. However Chess has a problem in that each player decision opens up another decision branch and to date all the branch outcomes become too numerous to follow to their conclusions with current technology, so not yet. That's just with 16 pieces per side and 64 locations/squares/hexes in the game.
Someone about a year ago asked about combinations of the existing boards and I calculated that even just for end to end combinations and trying a new combination each Planck unit of time (5x10^-44 seconds) and using the minimum space to hold the board orientation information (9 Planck units of volume) then it might be doable before the last star dies out except for the energy required to do the calculations. See: http://www.gamesquad.com/forums/index.php?threads/how-many-board-combinations.125852/.
Now that is not the same as figuring out what the number of possibilities for say a 10 squad 2 leader and a pair of LMG per side on a single board. With chess every player turn a single piece is moved and an attempt to capture/kill an enemy piece always works if the taking piece has the requisite reach. Each friendly chess piece has much stricter limits than an ASL unit, eg. no stacking, for pawns only forward movement (2 squares as first move, 1 thereafter) and only 2 possible attack targets, though can suffer Defensive Fire via the "En Passant" mechanism. Setup in chess is rigid as well. Then when doing an attack in ASL there are more than one outcome (eg no effect, pin, break, k/?, K with possible side orders of battle hardening, etc) rather than the one in chess (a capture). You have roughly an order of magnitude greater possibilities for each ASL unit each turn than for each chess piece. So while technology might eventually get to the stage that we may be able to say that White will always win, I very, very much doubt that we will ever be able to say the same for ASL. I suspect such a calculation would take many, many times longer than the universes lifetime. While theoretically calculable, it would be grossly impractical.
So in summary each ASL scenario has an optimum solution, there is no practical way to calculate that solution. The only other way is to play it many, many times. It's the equivalent of trying to calculate fluid flow via accounting for each molecule vs doing experiments and deriving the laws of fluid dynamics.
Someone about a year ago asked about combinations of the existing boards and I calculated that even just for end to end combinations and trying a new combination each Planck unit of time (5x10^-44 seconds) and using the minimum space to hold the board orientation information (9 Planck units of volume) then it might be doable before the last star dies out except for the energy required to do the calculations. See: http://www.gamesquad.com/forums/index.php?threads/how-many-board-combinations.125852/.
Now that is not the same as figuring out what the number of possibilities for say a 10 squad 2 leader and a pair of LMG per side on a single board. With chess every player turn a single piece is moved and an attempt to capture/kill an enemy piece always works if the taking piece has the requisite reach. Each friendly chess piece has much stricter limits than an ASL unit, eg. no stacking, for pawns only forward movement (2 squares as first move, 1 thereafter) and only 2 possible attack targets, though can suffer Defensive Fire via the "En Passant" mechanism. Setup in chess is rigid as well. Then when doing an attack in ASL there are more than one outcome (eg no effect, pin, break, k/?, K with possible side orders of battle hardening, etc) rather than the one in chess (a capture). You have roughly an order of magnitude greater possibilities for each ASL unit each turn than for each chess piece. So while technology might eventually get to the stage that we may be able to say that White will always win, I very, very much doubt that we will ever be able to say the same for ASL. I suspect such a calculation would take many, many times longer than the universes lifetime. While theoretically calculable, it would be grossly impractical.
So in summary each ASL scenario has an optimum solution, there is no practical way to calculate that solution. The only other way is to play it many, many times. It's the equivalent of trying to calculate fluid flow via accounting for each molecule vs doing experiments and deriving the laws of fluid dynamics.
