the current check for the endgame only sees if the biggest move has value lower than 6 to decide whether to start the endgame I think that's very uneffective (an endgame move maybe worth 20 points sometimes) I tried a simple check, starting from the definition of endgame, that is when all groups are safe -there's no more strategically valuable move- I used the dragon2 array for this checks if the safety of the dragons dragon2[x].safety (from 0 to number_of_dragons) if all are INVINCIBLE or ALIVE_IN_SEKI or DEAD or STRONGLY_ALIVE (if of these none of these is true (for any value of i) returns 0 =no endgame otherwise the function returns 1, endgame time) it's not complete as I have to see if there are valuable areas as well (an ambitious little strategical engine I'm writing;) but I wonder about the definition of inessential and alive etc, does anyone know which definitons mean it's actually not attackable or not defendable in any strategical way?
ps from the results I got this way seems to play a bit better than with the old check, but I'm still worried if it's actually correct :P