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It seems to me that you would need something more than a chess engine to
play a very large Chieftain-type game. As Chieftain is a step toward a
chess simulation of a wargame, I would think that a wargame AI of some sort
might need to be part of the software package. Or is it possible that, by
making what is 'combat' in a wargame 'capture by replacement' in the
CV, you can actually calculate the moves? For reference, here's the
current largest:
http://play.chessvariants.org/pbm/play.php?game%3DOverlord%26settings%3DOverlord+Chess+1.0

Because each side moves 8 pieces/turn [of 64 at start], I think the
decision tree is so great that one cannot go very deep. Surely you can
truncate the search in various ways, but why wouldn't these ways expose
the AI to superior human visual/pattern recognition? There are spots in the
game where you can make such in-depth calculations for a number of turns,
say 4ish complete turns, in a limited area. You cannot make such
calculations for the entire board or game, because there are far too many
moves of approximately equivalent value to project the gameboard even 2
turns into the future with high accuracy. Until the end, probably, when the
pieces are mostly gone.