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Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Mar 8, 2007 05:12 PM UTC:
Is it legitimate to use Chieftain Chess as a springboard to superlarge
games? Let's look at some numbers. My superlarge testbed is 24x24, for
576 squares. FIDE is 8x8 for 64 squares. CC is 12x16, for 192 squares,
exactly 1/3 the size of the superlarge and 3 times the size of the
standard, a perfect halfway point. While this guarantees nothing, it is a
good sign. Our only concerns now are that there is some kind of
discontinuity between large and superlarge that invalidates the
extrapolations, or that I just screw up doing the extrapolations, and get
bad results. I consider the second more likely. 
Pieces: FIDE/CC = 16/32 so triple the size, double the piece count...
gives us 64 pieces as a reasonable number. This is a bit higher than our
goal of around 50 pieces per side, and a bit lower than I expect the final
tally for the game I'm looking at. I figure around 100 or so per side.
[Background info: This game has been in concept for a while. It's a
large/superlarge variant of Gary Gifford's 6 Fortresses. Hi, Gary!
Remember what happened with our argument on Go and Chess? Now I got myself
in the same situation with Mats about large boards and compound pieces.
Glad you got me thinking about a very large version of 6F a while back -
thanks!] 
Types of pieces: FIDE/CC = 6/5 This, I believe, is one of those tricky
extrapolations - at least, I hope it is, because I plan to seriously bend
if not break this one in my test game. I certainly don't expect to have
only 4 different piece types in an example superlarge chess variant. In
fact, I am going to try to cheat, and introduce a range of pieces, by
adding not just some more pieces, but classes of pieces. The correct
extrapolation here is to *not* have a large number of different piece
types that are difficult to keep track of; one could comfortably keep
track of maybe 10 different kinds of pieces. To add the variety of pieces
a superlarge should have [otherwise, why bother?], we'll have to find a
workaround.