But onto the meat of it: So seed the resource pool and abilities based on player performance? Thus making information discovery/hiding king? Since we won't know the abilities of a given opponent? And greater resources mean bigger challenge and places greater importance on information and allows the player to discover more in a given encounter cause it lasts longer?
This certainly has some merit, maybe. And increasing the weight of information is also a very good suggestion I fully endorse.
The problem is that once we reach terminal velocity though. It basically signifies the end of an encounter once that velocity is reached. The problem I have with this is that resource isn't even health related though. Why have HP on an enemy if it ultimately matters very little in the end?
The only good argument I can think of for that is that a player is then spending time finishing one enemy off while the others get a chance to attack. But this is then mitigated by my above points on player leverage to turn group based fights into smaller encounters.
There's also the fact that the only way to counter player leverage when being creative (ie barrels) is to then massively increase resources to negate said leverage later on. Would then the AI seed such resources even in encounters that don't allow for as much leverage? That'd create problems of it's own and now you're discouraging creativity or enforcing it later on.
You can express that in an exponential curve; creative solutions are weighed as consuming a lot of resources so the AI won't be granted any extra resources but repeat exploitation leads to a sudden shift until resources normalized.
Furthermore, things like sneak need to be looked at as resources for the AI as well, the AI might have one stealth patroller this time but next time it might have 3 or other ways of detecting stealth.
But really the AI should just go hostile the second you start moving extra barrels around the vicinity.
More information weight would also be better though. Hiding how much magic/physical armor an enemy has would be a step further towards this.
EDIT: Oh, and there's still the fact that I can divide and conquer by choosing how many enemies to fight at once with patience; effectively limiting opponent access to how much of a resource they can have. That doesn't always work out, obviously. But it works a lot more than I'd think they ever intended.
Hiding information such as how much armor and health they have in higher difficulties but displaying how much total damage that unit has suffered would be great.
Recall that the question being posed through all of this is: Given you have no moving parts how do you make a game challenging through multiple play-throughs and guides? My answer to you is that information entropy must be king.
The implementation details matter less, it's more of me challenging you on the idea that a game cannot be rich and complex through multiple runs without system built entropy such as 'saving throws' etc.
In the end, all systems have their weaknesses, you make compromises based on what you desire out of it. The answer to some exploits might just be to ignore it if there is a certain experience you are aiming for.
I'll also answer the other points you made earlier at later time tomorrow or the day after since I really need to get some coding done.
