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Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 21, 2018 09:24 PM UTC:

OK, I see. I don't recall exactly anymore where the RR fitted in; it was one of the last armies I implemented in Fairy-Max (because initially it had trouble doing the R4). BTW, I always interpreted the promotion rule in CWdA as that you could only promote to pieces of your own army. This seemed logical to me; promoting to pieces of the opponent army strikes me as unnatural and ugly. But now I believe this is not what Betza originally meant; he was afraid having different promotion rules would cause the Pawns to have different values, which could easily disturb the balance, as you have so many of those.

But I once made an attempt to weaken an army by allowing Pawns to only promote to a Commoner, rather than a Queen-class piece, and it did not seem to affect the strength of the army at all! At first this seemed very strange, but then I realized that in practice you almost never allow a promoted piece to survive: you sacrifice a minor for the Pawn while you still can, or dedicate a minor to prevent it reaching the promotion square. By that reasoning the value of a Pawn is not so much determined by what it promotes to (as long as that is at least a minor), but more by what the opponent can use to prevent the promotion. This would mean that an army where the weakest piece is stronger (compensated by some of its stronger pieces being relatively weak) causes the Pawns of its opponent to be worth more. Having 7 pieces each worth 4.5 (vs FIDE with 4x3 + 2x5 + 9.5) would pose a real problem w.r.t. stopping opponent passers.

Anyway, since Fairy-Max does not support under-promotion, I had to appoint a unique promotion piece, and chose the most-valuable piece of each army. For the Nutters this was the Colonel. But the Colonel has a major shortcoming: it cannot move backwards fast. All native Nutter pieces actually have that problem. So if it comes down to a promotion race, and they can only promote to their own pieces, the Nutters are toast. Even when they promote 2 or 3 moves earlier, there is no way for them to prevent that the opponent will promote as well. Even worse, the freshly obtained Colonel might not even be able to connect with its own King fast enough, and get lost through a fork on King and Colonel. Especially when the opponent can promote to Queen. The Colonel is completely defenseles against slider or night attacks from behind.

Despite this, the Nutters seemed to have not much trouble beating FIDE. The average superiority of there pieces makes that they hardly ever get into an equal Pawn ending.