The AI is not doing a very good job in fights where victory squares are involved. I've played two recently -- the last fight in Defense of Woodhome and I think one of the Diamonds of the Kobolds fights (it involved armored pigs and kobolds). In both cases the AI did a very, very poor job of pressing the victory squares. Defense of Woodhome was particularly vexing as the AI spent a turn basically doing nothing. It had movement cards available, was not in contact with any of my characters, and yet didn't bother moving forward at all, basically giving me a free turn to run down the clock. I think it might have even been still sitting in the starting squares. I was pretty shocked when it decided to pass, as there was clearly a movement card sitting visible in it's hand unused. In both scenarios, toward the end of the scenario, a human player would have seen that the only way to win would be to stop fighting my fighter and go around and attack my wizard on the victory squares -- there was space available for it to maneuver around my fighter. Instead it just continued to slug it out with only 1-2 turns left and no figures moved to threaten my wizards control of the victory squares. I marked this as a possible bug, because I do not remember this behavior at all from the beta, so this may indicative of something in the code that was inadvertently changed at some point. Unfortunately I haven't played beta in several months, so it's not necessarily something that was changed recently, or it could be the beta code also had similar problems and either I don't remember or didn't encounter it.
The AI will sometimes pass randomly. It's a feature, not a bug. The intention is to make the AI a little less predictable so you can't be sure if the enemy is truly out of moves or not so it won't be quite that easy to trap the enemies in lava etc. These random passes of course often help the player as well. But yes, the AI could do better when it comes to handling victory squares, no argument there.
Here's another one where the AI is having problems with victory squares. Since the AI only has two figures left, there's no way the AI can win here unless they try to kill one of my characters. Instead they sit on the victory squares losing points until they lose the game: Also thanks for the explanation Zalminen. They really should check for special cases though. I had a situation where one of the enemy figures was sitting on a lava square (that I had already hit him with from the previous turn), still had a move card left, and proceeded to pass. Good thing for me, as it was a close match, between the 8 points he lost legitimately the first turn when he was out of movement points and the 8 points from the second turn when he could have moved but didn't, he was dead. (There was no immobilization card or AFAIK any other reason why he couldn't have just moved, he just decided to pass with moves still left.)
