On downtime, I've been playing the new Fire Emblem, which has made me really wonder how the AI works on the simple 3DS hardware. This is a nice complimentary read.
Pretty standard A.I. from what I could tell. But my memory might not be that great, it was awhile ago that I played it.
Is the new one significantly different from that? What stuck out for you as being particularly clever?
At the same time, you've laid out how the game works quite plainly, and I've read enough about Pac-Man to know that video games can seem more clever than they seem!
IIRC, in Fire Emblem every character gets some small amount of actions per turn, whereas in Hero Academy you have a pool of action points that you can spend among all your characters.
I mean there's some complexity beyond that simple description in FE (which hero moves first, their positioning and abilities can affect effectiveness of subsequent moves), but fundamentally the tree you must traverse is a lot wider and deeper with Hero Academy.
But the real hard problem is evaluation of moves. Even for simple games encoding of positional and temporal advantage is hard. This is really important for things such as build and research orders. Once weights are known, you may use any number of asymptotically optimal scheduling algorithms.