Zero Player Duel Wargame Rules?

There’s a strange desire that a as I have to play a zero player game. Not a solo game but a game that plays itself against itself. I also have a strange desire to play a duel game. A game that only has a single figure on a side. So I thought why not combine the two?

Each character in the game has 3 stats: Speed, Attack and Defence. The total of a figures stats should equal 7. For example a character could have Speed 3, Attack 3 and Defence 1. No stat can be less than 1 or higher than 5.

The game is players on a 1×10 square grid and only ever between 2 figures. 1 figure begins on the second square and the other begins on the 9th. So that there is 6 squares between the figures and 1 square between each figure and the edge of the grid.

The figure with the highest speed value goes first. If both figures have the same speed value randomly determine who goes first. During a figures turn it moves forward its full Speed in squares towards the enemy. It cannot move through the enemy figure and so will stop when it reaches them. Once the figures move is complete it will attack the enemy if they are in an adjacent square. If the enemy is not adjacent the figures turn ends.

If the enemy is adjacent then an attack is performed. Roll a number of dice equal to the attackers attack value. Each die that beats the enemy figure’s defence value causes the enemy figure to lose 1 life point and pushes them back 1 square. A figure cannot be pushed off of the board edge and so stops when they reach the last square.

Once the attack is resolved it is the other figures turn.

Figures begin with 10 life points, and once their life points are reduced to 0 they are KO’d and lose the fight.

The figures I’m currently using are a random mix of historicals from Irregular. There’s Wilhelm (S1,A3,D3) at the front, then Cyrus (S2,A3,D2), the row of three from left to right are Shadow (S3,A3,D1), Han (S1,A4,D2) and Vladimir (S2,A2,D3), and at the back is Xerxes (S1,A2,D4). In the tournament I played this evening Han came out on top, although he did have a few close calls. I’m wondering how to mathematically figure out if there is a best character build or if it’s a Rock Paper Scissors thing where one build is better against one thing but terrible against another?

I’m looking at adding more things to the system as it is pretty bare bones currently, but it worked well enough this evening that I thought it was worth posting.