Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I moved everything to one page, using the <DETAILS> tag for each army to keep the page content more manageable, and I moved the Interactive Diagram from one of the comments to the main page. For reference, here are the pages the armies were originally on, so that I might eventually move their comments here and remove them.

The Armies

• Humans
• Elves
• Dwarves
• Evil Horde
• Giants
• Druid

This can be treated the same way. Just define none of the Horde pieces as promoting, and entirely rely on the user-supplied function WeirdPromotion() to handle all promotions. Then you can make the depth (or in fact any shape) of the promotion zone dependent on the piece type. I checked, and I see there already is a way to veto a move: return 1022 as the promotion piece. For a real promotion, return the number of the promoted piece type.

There doesn't seem to be a provision for kamikaze moves, though; returning 0 means no promotion. So I would have to add a code for that (1021?).

Orc is certainly the main issue, but there is also the fact that for werewolf, the promotion zone is smaller than for every other piece.

I dont think the wierd promotion rules for horde are implementable in the diagram.

You mean those of the Orc? That is indeed too weird. It is like a locust capture throuh a Universal Leaper move, combined with 'promotion' to an empty square (kamikaze capture). And it can only be done when the fF move can enter the zone.

Kamikaze moves can already be implemented throuh providing a JavaScript routine WeirdPromotion(). A cU move in combinaiton with a kamikaze WeirdPromotion would do it. Except that it would then be able to do it from any square of the board, not just when it ended in the zone. One can also provide a routine BadZone() to veto moves, but I think that doesn't get the from-square of the move passed as an argument. (I used it for zone confinement in Xianqi, but it can also be used to enforce type-specific capture as in Stratego.) Not sure if WeirdPromotion() can veto moves; it should not be difficult to allow it to do so. It could then test whether the Orc was able to enter the zone. It would not be able to distinuish a normal capture of the Orc in the zone from a 'promotion capture', but I assume one would never voluntarily 'explode' the Orc if it could capture normally. So the Orc could be defined as a non-promotion piece, but all Orc captures could be tested for being diagonally forward, and if not, result in suicide if the Orc could enter the zone.

Triple (or more) captures can be defined in XBetza, but the UI of the diagram currently has no way to enter those. This is still on the to-do list, but so far the Lion Dog from the large Shogi variants was the only piece that would need it. So it did not have a very high priority.

I dont think the wierd promotion rules for horde are implementable in the diagram. The behemoth rider should be, but it cannot capture 3 pieces in a line (maybe I have mistake in XBetza, but I think it should be WmcaWmcamcaWmcamcabW).

On another note, Giant army is very poorly designed. In Giant vs Giant match, I think white can immediately win material.

It seems to be workign now. By the way, how do you choose which piece is royal?

With parameter royal=N, where N is the number of the piece type in the piece list (= the order in which you defined them). You can have several such parameters; if you have none, the last piece will be considered royal.

It seems to be workign now, thanks. By the way, how do you choose which piece is royal?

Testing the interactive diagram thing, but i can’t seem to make it work

Try Shift + reload, to make sure the cache is refreshed for the betza.js script. I just had some problems with the diagram too, and I jus uploaded a new version to fix those. For me most of the functions in your diagram seem to work now. (didn't try the AI, though.)

Otherwise, what exactly does not work?

One thing I foresee that will cause trouble is that you use the same id for white and black pieces. The diagram is not smart enough to keep separate sets of ids for white and black; it always assumes that each side can have all pieces in the list. So this will cause ambiguity, and will probably wreck the SAN parser when you want to paste back a recorded game. I solved that in CwdA by giving all black pieces a quote in their id.

Testing the interactive diagram thing, but i can’t seem to make it work

Yes, I'm open to ideas for new armies.

However, I've got a newer version of the game I really need to finish
writing up and send in.  I think it's better balanced, but still probably
not real well balanced.  It doesn't include the Giants or Druid (yet,
anyway).

I've got a number of half-baked ideas of my own for armies I want to
write up someday in the hopes they will inspire other people to add to
them, but I suppose I should get the new version ready first.

But yes, ideas would be very cool.

Hey!  Are you open to ideas for new armies?

--Jared