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H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Apr 13 11:38 AM UTC in reply to Daniel Zacharias from 06:08 AM:

What is to stop a player from using both his missiles to kill the royals? You could instead start the missiles outside the pawn line and add two more royals so there would always be two royals surviving.

The setup obviously should be such that killing both royals quickly is impossible. One can be killed easily; my first thought was that providing two would be enough. A player could decide to save one of his Missiles for the purpose of killing the one remaining royal later. But he would be 3 super-pieces plus 2 minors behind in the mean time, and with such a material lead I figured protecting the remaining royal should be possible. The Missiles only have Grasshopper-type moves, and should not easily penetrate deeply in enemy territory. A Pawn chain already would be an effective defence, once the Pawns get advanced.

As I wrote in my first post, the royals should have some powerful initial move to make the quick double-kill impossible. I did not implement that yet in the Diagram. But if, say, it was allowed for the King to swap with any piece on the back rank as first move, the position given by Jörg would not be a checkmate.

I admit that I had not foreseen that adding the Carriers would make the Missiles much more mobile. The purpose of the Carriers was to act as a relay for developing the slow leapers: any leaper that would hop onto one would be able to hop off as a non-capturing Queen in the same turn. Due to some technical problems with the Interactive Diagram that I have to fix first this doesn't work yet.

I was a bit dissatisfied with the Missile anyway, in the sense that I would want it to also explode on moving to an empty square. But since the explosion kills friend and foe alike, that would make it impossible to develop the Missile. Even exempting friendly pieces from destruction by the explosion would destroy the Missile itself. A solution would be to distinguish moves that hop over a friend from those that hop over a foe, and only explode on the latter. But if I make that distinction, I might as well limit the friendly hopping to the Alibaba moves. Then the Carriers would not provide much extra mobility for the Missiles; the latter could only hop between squares that they could have reached in a single move anyway.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback!


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