revised artillery model; thoughts on

No, we need artillery. Otherwise the campaign will get dull, like a very long chess game. It's the 3rd millenium, the pawns need guns already!

What if, instead of the offsides rule, a military model is maintained, and pawns must be adjacent to an artillery piece to operate it? The artillery could use the Pythagorean formula for their possible moves, like the knights, but for an artillery piece to move it must start from a cell adjacent to a pawn that does not otherwise move that turn. The designated pawn's move is to launch the artillery piece.

That would still allow white to take a black king on move 2, with a cannon -- the thing the offsides rule is supposed to prevent -- but there would be no way to prevent that cannon from getting captured in turn. Trade an artillery piece right away for a long term move count reduction, or devote resources to protecting it to save its awesome multidimensional coverage for the end-game?

It is not clear at all what combination of artillery rules will make for the best play, and implementation of the board as a computer program (well, anyone with 64 standard sets and an empty room with lots of tables could implement c4d as described three posts ago in meatspace) has a long way to go before the question becomes non-hypothetical.

Using 9 < D^2 < 15 as the move filter gives 640 possible cannon moves; using 16 < D^2 < 24 gives 1496 possible missile shots, but there is no place on the board where all of them will be possible. Starting at (4,4,4,4), there are 1176 possible moves that are not off the board, 80 of them in the 8th rank. ( D^2, of course, is the sum of the squares of the position displacement in all four dimensions.)

previous - next