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ChessVA computer program
. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
📝Greg Strong wrote on Tue, Nov 29, 2022 05:16 PM UTC in reply to Aurelian Florea from Mon Nov 28 12:32 PM:

How does the colourbound pieces bonus/penalty work when more pairs of colourbound pieces are involved?

The current approach is pretty simple.  First, it only applies to pieces that split the board into two regions.  Pieces with higher-order colorbindings, like Dabbabahs, are not considered for colorbound bonus/penalty at all.  A player is given a half-pawn bonus for having at least one colorbound piece on each "color" (see note below) and given a significant penalty for having two pieces on the same color with nothing on the other.

Note: All pieces with bindings that split the board in two are considered equivalent.  This is not ideal.  It is possible to have two different types of pieces that have two different "color" bindings that are not the same.  This happens in Alice Chess for example.  In Alice, both the Bishops and the Knights can only see half the boards, but they are not the same bindings!  (Any pair of bishop and knight will be on the same squares on one board and on opposite squares on the other.  The current strategy isn't smart enough to account for this.)

Does the endgame value of a piece influence opening exchanges, or is it just the middlegame value?

Endgame value will have no influence.  The evaluation of a position is interpolated between the midgame and endgame values based on the amount of material remaining.  It does not even start sliding from midgame to endgame until 20% of the starting material has been captured.

I have seen that you have programmed beautiful sun chess. Why not Xiangqi also?

The issue with Xiangqi is the very complicated and hard-to-implement repetition/anti-chasing rules.  I'm not even sure I understand them, much less know how to implement them (although I haven't really spent time on it.)