Is a good offensive always the best defense?
  A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through
extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The
introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a
tool to mimic the basic ingredients of a wide scope of real games. We find that
only for the player having the higher offensive expertise (the dominant player
), maximizing the offensive always increases the probability to win. For the
non-dominant player, interestingly, a complete minimization of the offensive
becomes the best way to win in many situations, depending on the relative
values of the defense expertise. Further simulations on the interplay of
defense expertise were done separately, in the context of a fully-offensive
scenario, offering a starting point for analytical treatments. In particular,
we established that in this scenario the total number of moves is defined only
by the player with the lower defensive expertise. We believe that these results
stand for a first step towards a new way to improve decisions-making in a large
number of zero-sum real games.
