Well, whaddaya know, that turned out to be really easy.

I have an autoplayer for Tower Defense now that carries out my carefully honed strategy for about ten levels -- perfectly. It's actually kind of hypnotic.

I'll post that tomorrow, I hope, but really I now want to investigate the other end of things; currently, the autoplayer plays utterly blindly. There's no way to measure its success, because it can't read the screen. But fortunately, the Win32 GUI gives us a screen capture API. (Under anything else, of course, YMMV.) So it should be easy to get the window's handle, get its DC, and get periodic snapshots, right? Then look at the snapshot for the score, lives, and money levels, and graph them. Maybe the level indicator, too, but that looks kinda hard to interpret.

Anyway, it should be fun and educational. Once I have that in a convenient PyWin wrapper, I can run this game to my heart's content without lifting a finger. Talk about leisure!