Ratings & Comments

I made some modificaions to the AI of the Interactive diagram. In particular, I simplified the Quiescence Search. This because it was prone to search explosion in variants with super-powerful pieces (such as hook movers and multi-capturers). The new QS only always searches capture of the last-moved piece when it is worth less than the attacker, or when it is unprotected. Other captures are only searched if there is enough remaining depth; new captures (i.e. those not possible 2 ply earlier) require a depth of 1/2 ply, other captures a full ply. This puts a limit to how long an exchange can continue.

This new QS is weaker then it was (but faster, and in complex situations far faster). To partly compensate that the default search depth is now 2.5 ply instead of 2 ply, and the depth can be adjusted in steps of 0.5 ply (from 2 to 4 ply).

I also slightly improved the positional bonuses for centralization; the bonus for that is now flatter in the horizontal directions, and pieces with a forward orthogonal slide but no distant other forward moves (such as Rooks and Lances) are exempt from the bonus. This avoids the annoying Rb1 after Nc3, then followed by Rc1 after Bd2, and prevents amassing all pieces on the central two files.

I wish this game were more popular. It seems like an excellent design. The piece selection seems strange at first but after thinking about it I can see the beauty of it.

I imagine the aanca could have originated as an enhanced ferz, to go with the bigger board. Then the knights could have become unicorns by gaining a diagonal slide after their leap to complement the aanca. The crocodile is a fairly obvious addition. The giraffe and Lion both make knight-like leaps, suitable for the large board, and the Lion includes and extra 3,0 leap which removes it's color binding and forms a nice looking pattern.

The result of all that is eight pieces with a nice range of power and an aesthetically consistent set of moves. There are all of the 2,1 3,1 and 3,2 leaping moves, the rook and bishop moves, and bent rook and bishop moves (unicorn and aanca). The leaping pieces are differentiated in power by some of them having additional movements, but they don't ever feel like arbitrary combinations.

The initial setup is also elegant. The Pawns start as far apart as they do on the 8x8 board, and the pieces are all on the back rank. The promotion rule fits well with this setup and is another great innovation.

I think the main weak points, if there are any, would be the pawns and the king's leap. It seems unlikely that the king would benefit much from a 2 square leap on such a big board with so much empty space; and perhaps modern pawns would be better. But overall this variant appears to be carefully designed.

I changed some H2 tags to H3 tags, and I moved one section from Rules to Notes. The script for displaying member-submitted content normally adds the appropriate H1 and H2 tags, and tags entered by the author should begin with H3.

Thanks for your feedback.

I have reinvented this chess variant into Kingsmen. The pawns are on the third rank like in Shogi, and cannot double advance on the first move (and hence no en passant).

Also like Shogi, all non-royal pieces in Kingsmen promote on the last three ranks. A promoted piece can move like a King (one square in any direction) in addition to its original moves.

I was thinking at bent riders that take 2 steps and then bend and keep going to that direction. This would be called very plastically Rook2 then bishop and Bishop2 then Rook. Would 2.Manticore and 2.Griffon be good names for them?

HG,

You have explained to me here :

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=33121

how to set up a machine match to test something. Is this still the way to do it or are there different things now?

This page has a broken image link.

I tidied up this page, replacing non-Unicode characters, and replacing the low effort ASCII diagram with one generated by Game Courier. It's still an ASCII diagram, because I wasn't sure what images to use for some of the pieces.

I have adjusted the em values for the headings so that specific integer pixel values will be used when the body font is 16px. These are 36px for H1, 32 for H2, 29 for H3, 26 for H4, 21 for H5, and 18 for H6. Instead of making the differences the same between each pair of neighboring headings, I used smaller differences where the style changed more, and I put a distance of .5em (8px) between distant headings using the same style.

It works, thanks!

I looked into the default sizes of H1-H6, and I learned that by default, H4 is the same size as the body text, and H5 and H6 are even smaller. This doesn't make sense to me. Headings should always be larger than the body text.

Someone might want to add paragraphs in a smaller-than-standard font. And these might need headers too.

Four header levels already seems quite generous to me.

HG, I had tried again but have not managed to do it. I don't yet need to set up a machine match, this will come later. I only need to know if fmax can play the game.

After looking at some pages, I decided that the pseudo horizontal rule works better for H2. It more clearly sends the message that this is a major section. Since Wikipedia does it, it should be familiar to people, and I don't think it would be considered an unprofessional look.

OK, this is better. Not necessarily better than last week's styles, but at least not far worse. The typeface no longer sticks out as typewriter-like, which I think is a huge improvement. (It is true it was only used in headers, but visually the headers dominate the impression the page makes, because they have such large font sizes.)

Presented in the comment the full-width underlining struck me as a bit weird, but I must admit that in the typical article with an Introduction / Setup / Pieces / Rules / Notes section it works.

Having headers in italics still strikes me as odd, though. But having 6 header levels seems overly generous; I was nottt even aware that HTML supported h5 and h6, and I cannot imagine I would ever need more than 3. So I suppose there isn't any real downside to having some of the lower-level headers in an uncommon style; most people won't need them, and the few that do need more than 3 levels but less than 6 can skip the styles they don't like.

The h5 style makes the impression of being 'incomplete', because it doesn't have left and right vertical borders. Even then, it is still a very exotic header style. The typeface of h1-h4 'blends in' very well with the typeface of the main text, but h5 and h6 somehow don't.

There still is a lare size gap between h4 and the main text. I would expect there to exist headers that had nearly the same size as the main text, but distinguish themselves by being boldface.

The font that is now on HTML buttons still seems fixed space. I don' think that is a good idea; it makes the buttons unnecessarily wide.

In the case a pawn is on the 7th rank without a piece captured (unlikely), let's say you can move it to the 8th rank and remains a pawn unless its twin promotes later.

You might want to read the later comments before replying to earlier comments that are no longer pertinent. If you still see the double underlines, you need to clear your cache.