Check out Modern Chess, our featured variant for January, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Jan 1 02:52 PM UTC in reply to Dmitry Eskin from 11:54 AM:

I am not convinced. 'Concentration' of attacks is certainly good, but I always thought this would be defined in terms of orthogonally adjacent attacked squares. The attacks of the Wazir are diagonally adjacent, and there is no special reason to think that is useful. With orthogonally adjacent attacks you can attack a Pawn and the square it could move to, so it cannot escape.

I see one advantage of a piece with W capture, though: if it is in time to stop a passer from promoting, it can annihilate the passer by attacking it from the front, thus blocking the square it could escape to rather than attacking that. In test on large boards (like 12x12) I discovered that it was very hard to compensate the R-B imbalance with Pawns. No matter how many extra Pawns the Bishop side got, he kept losing by about the same amount. I ascribed that to the ability of the Rook to annihilate isolated passers, while the Bishop can only prevent their advance (and then remains bound to stopping that passer forever). With so many Pawn on the large board most end-games started with scattered isolated Pawns, and the Rook would always win those end-games against Bishop or Knight. The extra Pawns were just cannon fodder.

As for mKcB and mKcR versus mKcN: the latter could be much weaker because it is slow, and cannot catch up with passers. But for mKcR it is enough that it can get behind the passer on the same file to stop it from promoting. And mKcB can advance its attack on the Pawn file by two squares per move by moving diagonally.

I once tested mKcN and mNcK. The former was about the same value as N and K. But the latter was about half a Pawn stronger! This surprised me, but then I realized it had the best of both worlds: it has the larger speed of the Knight, and the concentrated attacking power of the King, and thus the ability to annihilate Pawns once it catches up with those.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Asymmetric Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.