Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

In my play against the diagram, I did come across a different situation in which one might want to promote an Elephant to a King instead of a Saint or Ghost. This occurs when one wants to deny the opponent the opportunity to get the Saint or Ghost by re-capturing. The diagram used this ability of the Elephant to prevent me from getting a Saint, and that actually saved it from almost certain defeat, though I doubt the diagram would have let that situation arise if Elephants didn't have this ability. Still, I completely didn't see it coming and went on to lose the game.

Thank you for pointing this out. The rule for double capture that is generally assumend for Maka Dai Dai Shogi is that you would promote to the last one you capture of Saint and Ghost. The chairman of the Japanese Chu-Shogi association insisted that for a 2-out-1-in move it would be illegal to take the 2-out as a jump, so that you always have to capture the nearest piece first. In that case the rule becomes equivalent to what I wrote it in the article. The special script I embedded in this page to handle the promotions uses the original rule, deciding on sequence rather than distance.

But it seems I specified the Wolf's move in XBetza so that 2-out-1-in does jump 2-out first. Since this seems a "never happens" case, I did not pay much attention to it. ANy rule about it is made up in modern times, as the monks who conceived Maka Dai Dai Shogi did not specify any rule for it: they were sensible people, and did not address situations they knew would never happen in practice.

As to the Elephant promotion: this appears to be a consequence to the way I programmed the immunity to contageon for the royal pieces: I always force those to promote to their own promoted form, irrespective of what they capture, and this also suppressed the ability to defer promotion. Like you say, there never is any reason to defer, so I did not worry about this.

What worries me more is that the Elephant is considered a royal piece in this context. Because it really isn't, and if you can promote it you should have another royal already (or you would already have lost the game). I would certainly not prefer to have a second King in that case over having a piece as strong as a Saint or Ghost. Perhaps unless my other King is in checkmate and cannot escape capture on the next move. But even then, the newly acquired King would find itself in the front line where captures are going on, so the chances it will survive the next few moves seem dismal. So I think this is a rather non-sensical exemption, and wonder if it would not be better to drop that rule altogether.

Also, the Elephant doesn't have the option to defer promotion when capturing the Capricorner. I don't know why anyone would want to defer promotion in this particular case, but it seems to be allowed in the rules.

In the rules, it states, "If it captures both Saint (Priest) and Ghost (Pirate) in one turn, it promotes to the one that was farthest away from it." in the section about the Wolf and Saint, but the diagram seems to always just promote a Wolf corresponding to the one it captured second.