There could be a solution but first remember the the state space of the possible solutions is linked to the choosing of the pieces out of a small possible set, is it is probably non-neglijable likely to plainly not be able to succeed as the demands ar pretty tight.

I agree that absolutely perfect balance between all combinations of armies could be very difficult, but I also think it's not necessary.  Even if they are not balanced enough for computer vs. computer matches to come out exactly even, so long as the goal is to make a game good for humans I think we absolutely can get sufficiently balanced armies.

My take from cwda is not about balance but aboutsomething i'd call "dinamic balance" as each army seems to "mean" something.

It is unfortunate that Betza hasn't been heard from in nearly 15 years now and may not even be alive.  But he has written a lot of content on this site about piece values, his struggles to determine them, and his goals for Chess with Different Armies, and his previous failed attempt at it.  I believe we know enough from these writings to feel confident that an even balance between armies was THE primary goal and, if he were here, he would be continuing to work toward it.

Yes, each army does have a unique "flavor" that absolutely should be preserved to the maximum extent possible.  But making the BD's leap a lame leap is a very, very tiny change that doesn't change the flavor at all, at least in my opinion.  I can't really see an argument against this change unless one believes that it is Betza's game and only he can update it and, consequently, if he's dead we are stuck with it forever.

The fact is we have learned a lot since this game was made and Betza was unfortunately wrong about some things.  The Archbishop is worth a lot more than he thought as just one example.  If he had known what we know now, he would have made different decisions.  There's a page here somewhere where he talks about the Short Rook and trying to decide what the range should be and how he used computer vs. computer test matches to help validate the decisions exactly as we are doing.

The Musketeer Chess approach is problematic.  For one thing, you are taking about a radical change that makes a completely different game.  You no longer have armies with themes that "mean" something as you put it.  And, we have determined that the strength of an army depends heavily on the specific combination of pieces, not just the individual pieces.  If you want to make such a game, I would encourage it and I would try to help if you wanted, but I don't see this as a valid approach to rescuing CwDA.

I've just tried to edit a number of presets that were not authored by me. Nowadays (at least) it seems I'm never provided with a field to enter my own password when attempting such an editing task, and that may explain why in each case when I attempted (again) to save something called '3D Chess War', I was told that I was not the author of the preset.

Has something been changed?

I see that other people have recently successfully produced editor-approved presets, but it's not apparent that the settings file for such was made recently.

I'm not acquainted with how to make a settings file from absolute scratch, if that's even possible.

It is clear that the change BD -> BnD should weaken the Clobberers against any opponent, which would be undesirable against opponents that already have the upper hand. But usually such opponents would also be stronger than FIDE, and would also have to be weakened. My earlier testing with Fairy-Max suggested that the performance of armies was reasonably 'transitive', in the sense that when A > B, and B > C, then A > C by an amount approximately equal to the sum of the first two. The only anomaly was that the Nutters under-performed against the Clobberers. I conjectured that this could again be a strategic issue, namely that the more forward-directed strategy and slow backwardness of the Nutters backfires when the army has pairs of pieces (or single pieces) that can easily checkmate a King.

It is a pity that test takes so long (a common problem in computer chess...). I suppose that the new ChessV is stronger than Fairy-Max? Have you ever measured by how much? What TC are you using for these tests? Have you tried how far you can push that, without significantly affecting the result? Large depth is only needed to bring the eventual tactical punishment of strategically bad moves within the horizon, so a more advanced evaluation (e.g. for Pawn structure and King Safety) should allow faster games without play becoming so unrealistic that it is no longer a representative sampling of the pieces their tactical abilities. People are nowadays tuning their engine's evaluation at ~0.25 sec/move (e.g. 10 sec + 0.1 sec/move). It would surely save a lot of time if that would work for piece-strength measurements too.

The danger is that playing at a lower level reduces all 'excess scores', even though the ratio of these scores keep constant (so that you get the same value in terms of centi-Pawn when you divide them by the Pawn-odds score). For a twice-lower Pawn-odds score you would need 4 times as many games to get the same resolution in centi-Pawns. So I suppose there will be an optimum there. Too high a quality of play is also not good. btw; you want the typical evaluation lost per move compared to prefect play to be so large that over the duration of a game it typically accumulates to a range wider than the draw interval (say [-150cP, +150cP]), so that small departures from equality in the initial imbalance already significantly sample the won/lost range.

I guess things are nearly as I want them now:

Like a hypen between two pieces displays the pieces in the same square behind each other, a vertical bar will display the pieces above each other, the lower one vertically flipped to create symbols for forward-backward asymmetric pieces ('hunters'). It also cuts the pieces to half the square size, in that case:

The renderer now first looks if there is a file defaults.ini in the directory for the specified SVG piece set. This file can overrule the hard-coded defaults for the colors (including the original white filling color, so it knows what to replace). In addition it can specify some scaling parameters used for displaying two pieces in one square (horizontal and vertical scaling, horizontal offsets, vertical culling), so these can be made piece-set dependent. Finally it allows specification of a list of aliases for the dressed-letter codes used in the FEN. E.g. B~ stands for knighted bishop, but in Alfaerie this is a cut-and-paste symbol for which I did not make a separate SVG image. So I defined it as an alias for B-N, synthesizing the image on the fly.

Now that it is possible to mess around with the alfaerie piece images, you should be able to work on a part two very easily.

I have a bit of discomfort as the game did not had any lame leapers before but that borders on nothing. I'm more concerned how the change affect the balance against the two other armies. As this seems to me that will lead to a wave of interconnected changes that are probably not easy to pull through. Some sort of logical system of equations needs maintaining and I honestly doubt such and endevour is even doable, little to say about feasible. This because you don't have many options for tunning while keeping the initial flavour on

This is a valid concern, but I'm hoping this does not become a problem.  And a tiny bit of rock-paper-scisors effect is acceptable so long as things are balanced against the FIDEs.  Obviously, the FIDEs are the one army that cannot be modified.  For an example of a board game that has significant R-P-S effect but is still an awesome game, see tournament Star Fleet Battles.  I should say this as I was probably not clear - I am NOT proposing making this change until testing of all combinations is complete, along with some testing of evaluation terms changes...  This is just what I'm leaning towards given what we know so far.

It is a pity that test takes so long (a common problem in computer chess...)

Indeed it is, but I can scale up quite a bit.  I actually have quite a few i5 and i7 PCs that can be pressed into service to do testing (6 or 7 of them.)  The longest part, which is largely manual, is calculating out all the starting positions so I can feel very confident that my tests aren't playing the same games over and over.  But when this is accomplished I can scale up testing quickly.  I have just finished generating 20 positions of FF vs RR and am just starting on those with the colors reversed.

I suppose that the new ChessV is stronger than Fairy-Max? Have you ever measured by how much?

My current builds are definitely stronger than Fairy-Max, at least at the various 10x8 variants, but I have not done formal measurements.  I intend to test that with my new "batch mode" capability also, but I've been focused on CwDA tests instead :)  ChessV will control XBoard protocol engines for many games, but CwDA is not one of them because it would require more standards than presently exist.  I should also mention that Fairy-Max is an absolute speed demon, in terms of nodes-per-second, compared to ChessV at approximately 4x the nodes.  ChessV's strength comes from smarter search (using ideas stolen from Stockfish and other GPL engines - I take absolutely no credit for this) and better evaluation.

What TC are you using for these tests?

The 400-game sets use different time controls as one way to get more varied results.  They also modify the new Variation setting from None (which is completely deterministic) to Small (for most games) to Medium (for a few games.)  The fastest time controls I'm using are 25 sec + 2 sec/move.  The longest are 5 minutes + 1 sec/move.  Typically a 400-game set on one computer takes about 2 days.  I will post a new (unofficial) version here shortly along with all my opening positions and batch mode control files so everyone can see exactly what I'm doing and run tests of their own.

Regarding the NN vs FF test with the FIDEs given more encouragement to advance through the PSTs, the test is half done.  The 200 games where the NNs are white and the FFs are black are done.  The Nutters won 136, the FIDEs won 36, with 28 draws.  So it doesn't look like this is making the situation any better although these are all games where the nutters have the first move.  Tomorrow we should know the final results.

I think a rule is missing here regarding the placement of the second marker. Gamut of Games reads, "The other can be placed in any empty space the player wishes, except that if only one space is open for the opponent's upcoming move, the space cannot be covered." 

I don't see this rule above.

Here's a test diagram:

I'm thinking of a variant idea that might be called '3D Chess War' after all. The rules I'm thinking of at the moment would be: each player moves, in virtually 'independent' chess games played on each of the 4 boards, until a checkmate occurs on one board (or a resignation), and that wins the whole 'game' (or war). White on his first 'turn' moves once each only on boards C and D, and from then on each player makes one move on each of the four boards, from his left to his right (i.e. Black in order moves once on board D then on C, B and A, then White moves once on board A then on B, C and D). White moved only on two boards on turn one to compensate Black for the disadvantage of having the second turn to some degree. If any board is agreed to be a draw, one player places his king on that board next to the other player's king, where adjacent squares for the kings are possible, and play on that board is discontinued for the rest of the 'game' (war), with any draws not counting (except that draws resulting on all 4 boards would mean that the 'game' [war] is a draw). A draw offer for any specified particular board(s) is offered at the end of a player's overall turn, with a comment to that effect.

It seems that the 4 boards would simply be almost totally independent of each other (checkmate on one deciding the war, aside), and that this variant idea is not truly 3D-like, but I can imagine if a player gets into a disadvantage on some board(s) he may well be able to start taking bigger risks on other board(s) than he might normally. This variant idea also has the point that if ever played between strong players, an overall draw result would be less likely than for a single game of chess, and perhaps fewer premature draw offers would be made (for particular board[s]). Also, upset wins against a stronger opponent might happen more often than in case of a single game of chess.

Some more SVG:

I now also allow specification of a rotation in the FEN, through prefixes '_' (180 deg), '>' (+90 deg), '<' (-90 deg), '><' (+45 deg), '>>' (+135 deg) etc.

I took the liberty to redesign the 'Steward', giving it a bit more 'body'; the original one was a bit flimsy.

Since the site was down for a week, I added a week of time to the players whose moves were interrupted by this downtime. But this works only in Game Courier itself. To repeat accurate calculations for each log, the Logs page would have to load each log, which would multiply the work it has to do. Instead, it relies on the value of the Deadline column in the GameLogs table. This is a fixed value that was not updated when I added code to Game Courier to compensate for the time lost by the site being down. Since this value may be mistaken, the Logs page no longer updates logs or the database when time has run out. In this case, it is mistaken, and you should simply continue your game.

The SVG pieces are looking good. When you have finished making them, I'm hoping you could put them into a zip file and make it available for downloading. I could then work on making use of them with Game Courier and the Diagram Designer.

It is good to be able to put more than one piece on the same space, but I'll point out that Game Courier uses the hyphen for non-space, and you might want to do the same if you plan on handling boards that are not completely rectangular. In that case, you might want to come up with a different way of including multiple pieces on the same space. Since Game Courier encloses longer names in braces, what I'm thinking of is to place multiple comma-separated names between a pair of braces.

The game log of mine in question is now acting as if my opponent (who has since made a move) never lost on time, ever, and clock times are okay in view of what you just wrote Fergus, so it's a case that things have now resolved themselves successfully.

I uploaded a tar ball with all the SVG images to http://winboard.nl/graphics.dir/svg.tar.gz .

Testing a board with holes: