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Kevin Pacey wrote on Tue, Jul 18, 2017 11:21 PM UTC:

I'm not entirely confident of my own value for a guard (or king's fighting value, which is about the same IMHO) on a 12x12 board, which I put at only about 1.75 Pawns. This also affects my calculations for the value I gave for a Cat and Star-Cat, which would otherwise be higher. For an 8x8 board, I put a guard at worth 4, though H.G. has it considerably lower, at least for the opening phase of a game, I believe.

For a 12x12 board I put the value of a bishop at 3.75 and rook at 5.75, with queen = bishop + rook + pawn = 10.5. These arguably high values (for B, R and Q) are due to the increase in scope long-range pieces obtain on such a bigger board. Perhaps a counter-argument is that on bigger boards such pieces may reach a lower percentage of squares on the board in one move, on average, than on an 8x8 board, but this seems less important than scope.

On such a large board (12x12) this variant's special knight movement rule (initial double step) still might not make the knight in this game significantly stronger than a normal knight, I'd guess. In either case, I'd put it at worth 3 pawns. Sometimes a normal N is valued at less than 3 on a 10x10 board, even, though I think at least on that board size a N can still cope with 2 or 3 passed pawns quite often, if nothing else. Similarly, a pawn still = 1 in this variant, IMO.

P.S.: I don't know if H.G.'s formulae have ever included one for a multi-capture bonus, fwiw. If there is such a formula, it's likely different than the crude one I cooked up (and haven't disclosed).


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