As far as I can tell, George gets all of his piece stats from about 95% sheer intuition and 5% wildly unrepresentative examples. If you actually went through his numbers rigorously and systematically, I suspect you'd discover that many of them are total fabrications.
He even gives a mate # of 2 for Water Rook, a piece that George himself defined as specifically only moving on light-colored squares (the piece that moves in exactly the same pattern on dark squares has a different name), which therefore obviously cannot force a mate with any number! That's like giving a mate # for Bishops that are all on the same color.
...and even if he hadn't defined them in this bizarre way, two is definitely not enough of them to force a mate in general. I believe two Dababba-riders can sometimes force mate, if they are on different colors and can cut the enemy king off from the 'safe' edge of the board, but the Water/Land Rooks are lame Dababba-riders, and therefore cannot control an entire rank/file even when working together.
Incidentally, if we're playing fox-and-geese with rotating spearmen, I think you'll find that 3 spearmen + king is sufficient to win most reasonable starting positions (use two spearmen pointing forward to confine the enemy king to a corridor and then just chase him down).
As far as I can tell, George gets all of his piece stats from about 95% sheer intuition and 5% wildly unrepresentative examples. If you actually went through his numbers rigorously and systematically, I suspect you'd discover that many of them are total fabrications.
He even gives a mate # of 2 for Water Rook, a piece that George himself defined as specifically only moving on light-colored squares (the piece that moves in exactly the same pattern on dark squares has a different name), which therefore obviously cannot force a mate with any number! That's like giving a mate # for Bishops that are all on the same color.
...and even if he hadn't defined them in this bizarre way, two is definitely not enough of them to force a mate in general. I believe two Dababba-riders can sometimes force mate, if they are on different colors and can cut the enemy king off from the 'safe' edge of the board, but the Water/Land Rooks are lame Dababba-riders, and therefore cannot control an entire rank/file even when working together.
Incidentally, if we're playing fox-and-geese with rotating spearmen, I think you'll find that 3 spearmen + king is sufficient to win most reasonable starting positions (use two spearmen pointing forward to confine the enemy king to a corridor and then just chase him down).