Comments by lilyhollow

I think I would probably change the pawns to be just normal pawns (and do a shogi/grand chess-style promotion zone). I investigated some opening positions a couple years ago, and with the weird pawns there were just some really strange semi-forcing situations with cannons. I'll probably edit this into the actual page at some point but I'm too lazy atm!

I played a good amount of Chess 2 (actually I was very obsessed with it for a while, and I stole the ghost piece idea for the variant i posted on this site). Mostly I would play against stronger players, but beat them very badly using the Reaper army. Basically I played the game regularly with someone locally and we came up with all of these ideas with Reaper, and nobody learned how to deal with it in the time that I spent online with the game. So I do think the game probably needs some balance adjustments, particularly to Reaper, Two Kings, and Nemesis. The dueling system also doesn't feel that great a lot of the time. I really like the dueling in a lot of ways, but then there are situations where you can win/lose a game off of a single duel, and that can feel really awkward.

I just want to get a little bit more specific with my thoughts on the game's balance. I think Classic/Empowered/Animals are all pretty good where they are. I kind of feel like Empowered could be a little bit on the strong side, but I could be wrong on that.

Reaper, I think, kills pretty much everyone. I think Classic/Empowered/Animals all struggle immensely and might have just no hope against Reaper at all due to double ghost rook opening. I never saw anyone doing double ghost rook opening online, so maybe they figured out how to deal with it after I stopped playing, but I would completely stonewall players with tons of hours in the game with that. I think Reaper kills Nemesis too though. Maybe some people thought Nemesis beat them, but Nemesis just can't really deal with all of the blockades you can set up. I never really had trouble against Nemesis with Reaper, I would just tie them in knots and eat them alive. Anyway Reaper definitely would need to be nerfed

I think Reaper is basically helpless against Two Kings, though. The thing about Reaper is that it essentially needs midline invasion to win. Two Kings has absolutely no problem defending the midline, so they have to really screw up for you to have a chance.

I actually think Two Kings is probably too good overall, as well. I think they probably beat Empowered/Classic/Animals pretty comfortably, and then are like actually invincible against Reaper unless the Reaper outplays to an extreme degree. So Two Kings probably needs a nerf...

But then there's the problem that Two Kings dies horribly to Nemesis? I guess there's a chance they're actually okay against Nemesis somehow... but I wasn't able to figure it out in the time that I played. I feel like they really just get clobbered there.

So the balance problems seem tough to solve since there's kind of a rock-paper-scissors thing going on. I've thought of ways to weaken Reaper, weaken Two Kings, and make the Reaper vs Two Kings matchup much fairer, but no idea how to fix Two Kings vs Nemesis.

I do expect this to be more drawish than fide chess. I think you would need to pair this with some other significant changes to the game in order to fully take advantage of it. Like maybe more power on the board, or another win condition, or a drop mechanic or something.

I'm most interested in what this would do to the opening though. That would be fun to see.

This variant was very influential on me; I found it specifically because I was looking for variants that used cannons, but the pawns really hooked me.

I'm in agreement that the starting position is odd. I would push everything back a row, and then just find a starting square for the nightriders that makes sure they're not immediately attacking anything. 

This is kind of a criticism of the nightrider itself, but in practice it's probably not fun to constantly keep track of what pieces it's threatening from far away. The piece seems fun but I feel like there are other possibilities that don't require so much 'proofreading' of the board.

I like the 'king reaches the last row' win condition. On such a large board, especially if everything were pushed back a row to begin with, it may be logical to change that to 'king passes the midline.' Not necessary, but not an extreme possibility either.

Those knights would maybe end up being the strongest pieces in the game, which is significant because there are two of them. For reference, in crazyhouse, knights are like barely worse than rooks. But I think these knights gain more from promotion than the bishop and rook do.

That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, just something of note!

Yes, though I ended up crediting Chess 2 since the piece is directly lifted from that game, including the fact that it cannot be captured.