Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
Based on my experiences with Zillions of Games, I think that the Dragon King is too tough to checkmate (and, perhaps, so are the Pope and Eques Rex).
I'm thinking of borrowing a rule from Metamachy for limiting the movement of the Eques Rex, which I'm planning to rename Cavalier King. In that game, a King may leap two spaces on its first move, but it may not pass through check. To make a Knight move, it must have an unchecked path to the space. So, I'm thinking of limiting the Cavalier King in that way. It could not make a Knight leap if both spaces adjacent to it and its destination were checked. However, this would not apply to checks from royal pieces. This would allow the Cavalier King to check another royal piece with different powers of movement.
Cavalier Chess handles the power of this piece by giving greater power to the other pieces, but in Fusion Chess, the pieces have the same total power as they do in Chess, and all that's different is having the ability to more fluidly redistribute power among the pieces. So, weakening the royal piece in this game seems more called for.
It could not make a Knight leap if both spaces adjacent to it and its destination were checked. However, this would not apply to checks from royal pieces. This would allow the Cavalier King to check another royal piece with different powers of movement.
Not quite. To be in line with how other royal compounds work, it would be able to check another royal piece without restriction, but checks from the opponent's royal piece would still otherwise impede its movement.
On second thought, this makes the Queen immune to the Cavalier King capturing it as a Knight. However, the Queen is also immune to being captured at a distance by the other royal pieces. Each compound royal piece can capture two of the simple pieces at a distance. The Cavalier King can capture the Rook or Bishop at a distance, the Dragon King can capture the Bishop or Knight, and what I'm now calling the Pontiff can capture the Rook or Knight. So, it's all symmetrical, and if I made an exception for the Cavalier King's Knight leap, that would make it more formidable than the other two compound royal pieces.
I removed this from the page, because the link went to another site that was insisting that I install a Firefox extension that would change my search provider before I could proceed any further:
Vchess.club
Vchess.club is a website created by Benjamin Auder for playing Chess variants online. It allows for live play, correspondence play, and play against an engine.
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> It would need some rule that you cannot move a royal slider through check, like in Caissa Brittannia, to make it a serious game.
Since I was just thinking of another rule I wanted to change, I opened my .zrf file for this game to see how I could make the change. When I did open it, I noticed that I made some rule updates in 2006, but I never changed the rules on this page. One of the rules was the one you suggested here. Here are my comments from the .zrf file:
As the rules are currently written, the King may initiate fusion, but another piece may not initiate fusion with the King. Two of the rule changes above reverse this. This might be to prevent the King from using fusion to get out of check.
The new rule I'm thinking of adding limits the use of fission for getting out of check. I initially thought of just forbidding fission for getting out of check, but it seems simpler to forbid fission by a piece that is currently attacked. This prevents the two ways fission could be used to get out of check that would tilt the advantage in favor of defense. One is if a royal compound piece is in check, and the player splits off the non-royal component to block the check. The other is if a pinned piece is blocking one check, and it splits off one of its components to block another check. This is more permissive in some ways and more restrictive in some ways than the other condition I thought of. It is more permissive, because it allows a check to be blocked by splitting apart an unpinned piece. It is more restrictive, because it does not allow any attacked piece to split apart.
Its main advantage is that it will require less overhead. In Zillions, I can just add "not-attacked?" to the appropriate code, and in Game Courier, the legal fission moves will all correspond with other legal moves, which eliminates the need to write extra code for calculating possible fission moves. Since that advantage would be lost if I used both conditions, I will just use the simpler condition. So, the rule I'm thinking of adding is that it is illegal to split apart a piece that is attacked.
I am currently in the process of programming a Game Courier preset for Fusion Chess. When I have finished with that, and when I have updated the Zillions file, I'll officially update the rules.