I've just coded and tested the default AI. It is fun. The coding effort is less than I expected. No fancy AI technologies is used, yet. But I will improve it when I have time.

But I did stumble over AI order animation code. In local play mode, after a user submits his order, the human order animation is run from the Swing event dispatch thread. Then AI takes over, and starts a new AI order animation thread from the same 'one and only' Swing event dispatch thread. All three threads need to access the same data model. I hate Java threads and concurrency! It drives me nuts. After a day's tweaking, I have finally figured out a solution.

Taiwan on Monday started a computerized war-game simulating a D-Day style attack by China. That's nice, good for them to be prepared. I've been setting up a similar scenario on my war game engine as well. I've made some good progress in combat modeling. Such attack will be more complicated than D-Day in World War II. It should be a blitz attack from land, air and sea simultaneously in all 3 dimensions. To be successful, time and speed is very important to China. Taiwan is a small island, there's no space to make strategic retreat and regroup. It's ideal for blitzkrieg. As long as China can finish it off in a few days, US won't get a chance to be involved.

That's how Hitler took over Europe in a matter of weeks. But then he grew too confident about it and misused it against Russia. But Russia is a huge country, she can give up space for time. As long as Russians got over the initial shock and confusion, they regrouped and fought back successfully. Hitler should not attack Russia at all, at least he should wait until he conquered British Isles or made peace with British.