Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Charles Daniel wrote on Fri, Jun 27, 2008 06:19 PM UTC:
Some tips for players who try this preset out: 
Even if you cannot beat zillions in orthodox chess, you have a chance in this game. 
The reason: pawn play! 
Zillions is horrible in the way it moves pawns. Its logic is as follows: - the starting configuration is very safe for the king. Pushing the pawn forward weakens it 

Therefore it very rarely moves pawns all the way to the center. 
Zillions even prefers to move the ninja pawns sideways.
 The trick to winning is to control the center with pawns, watch out for threats from the sorcerers/other pieces - zillions keeps hopping those into your territory. Once you fend out  piece attacks, zillions cannot win. It has absolutely no basic strategy built into algorithm unlike new chess playing software that is much stronger. 
Once it brings its queen into your territory keep attacking it - (but be careful) and soon you will have the queen trapped. 

It played exactly the same way with the queen in std chess against another computer (crafty) . It always ends up losing the queen and then the game.  




To draw, you can barricade yourself in the starting position and zillions cannot win! It keeps shuffling its pieces into your territory looking for forks, attacks etc. 
It never charges with the pawns which is the way to win if your opponent does this. 



My analysis: the more you can limit its tactics, the better - in Herculean you have a good chance of doing this with the pawns. Thus, one can argue that this is 'harder' for a computer than regular chess. But I am sure that all new software will have no problems at all - pawn play is far superior in new computers.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Herculean Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.