Greg Strong wrote on Mon, Sep 5, 2016 06:21 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
A promising game that might be worthy of upgrade to Excellent pending play-testing, which I will now try with Jose's new preset.
Reading through the comments, the promotion rules seem to provoke the most disagreement. I must admit that I don't like the promotion rules as written. I can see both promotion only to general, or promotion to general or to any lost piece as reasonable options, both leading to good although different games. For myself, the part I find troubling is this:
At most, only 3 lost pieces may be regained: 1 rook, 1 knight, and 1 elephant, even if the player has lost both of any type.
The problem with this is that it is no longer possible to look at a board and know what moves are legal. You'd have to also know about all past promotions. This makes the game much more difficult to program. Chess has this issue too with castling - you have to know which rooks/kings have moved, although when the game has progressed enough that these pieces are no longer on their original squares it becomes a non-issue. Also, Chess has established standards for how the castling information is preserved in the FEN game notation. If we wanted to notate positions of Modern Shatranj with FEN notation, (certainly a worthy goal), new notation standards would need to be invented. I would question whether the value of this particular rule justifies the significant added complexity.
A promising game that might be worthy of upgrade to Excellent pending play-testing, which I will now try with Jose's new preset.
Reading through the comments, the promotion rules seem to provoke the most disagreement. I must admit that I don't like the promotion rules as written. I can see both promotion only to general, or promotion to general or to any lost piece as reasonable options, both leading to good although different games. For myself, the part I find troubling is this:
The problem with this is that it is no longer possible to look at a board and know what moves are legal. You'd have to also know about all past promotions. This makes the game much more difficult to program. Chess has this issue too with castling - you have to know which rooks/kings have moved, although when the game has progressed enough that these pieces are no longer on their original squares it becomes a non-issue. Also, Chess has established standards for how the castling information is preserved in the FEN game notation. If we wanted to notate positions of Modern Shatranj with FEN notation, (certainly a worthy goal), new notation standards would need to be invented. I would question whether the value of this particular rule justifies the significant added complexity.