CPU Strategery?!?!?!

[rtsquared]

Does the CPU do any long-term strategy, or does it pretty much make random moves unless there's an obvious (to it) tactical opportunity?

There are the (normal?) times when the CPU will move a knight to [a/h][3/6], only to move it back to [b/g][1/8] 1-3 moves later. I have to believe there's some greater strategy to this that I just don't understand, because to me it's just sacrificing tempi for the heck of it. I also don't understand the early [a/c/h][4/5] pawn pushes except as a means of preventing queen attacks (which seems dubious to me).

This one, however, takes the cake for me. I'm playing black in the two timelines variant against the Balanced CPU.

The first moves:
1. 0Le2 to 0Le4 -0LNb1 to -0La3 / 0LNg8 to 0Lf6 -0LNg8 to -0Lf6
2. -0LQd1 to 0Le2 / 0LNb8 to 0Lc6 -0Lg7 to -0Lg6
3. 0LQd1 to -0Ld1

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! I get the logic behind getting both queens on the same board - but then to move the original 0L queen back to -0L in it's starting position the very next move? You wind up with the same white piece configuration with 0LQd1 to 0Le2, with an additional tempo in 0L and two additional tempo on -0L.

I should never be able to defeat a competent computer opponent in this game - tactics in so many dimensions to consider at any given time (made more difficult by two starting timelines). However, I win more than my fair share because of the lack of any reasonably coherent plan on the part of the CPU player.

Are there plans to make the CPU player a more worthy/soul-crushing opponent? I'm absolutely sure that building a chess engine for this game is at least an order of magnitude more complex than for normal chess, but my dream would be a fork of something like Lc0 that players like myself could contribute spare cycles to. Maybe I'm the only player who plays the CPU regularly, so improving the engine would be a waste of limited programmer resources, but...

[BauerMan24]

Lockbox

[BauerMan24]

Yeah it would be nice to have a real CPU therefore we could just lose 1000 games in a row and get a real feel for the game.

[Mewi]

Sometimes the Balanced (strong) bot will play the worst possible move, even. As if it wanted to resign, the bot played f3 and enabled this mate-in-two: https://i.imgur.com/bXSVCOg.png

[Perseus]

Originally posted by Mewi:

Sometimes the Balanced (strong) bot will play the worst possible move, even. As if it wanted to resign, the bot played f3 and enabled this mate-in-two: https://i.imgur.com/bXSVCOg.png

Once, the bot was about to defeat me, they only needed to play one more turn of normal moves to win, but instead went back in time in such a way that i was able to win a few turns later.

[fractalgem]

I often see the computer wasting their timeline on moving a knight back in time very early on, rather than a more powerful queen.