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Armies of Faith 1: The Dawn of Civilisation. The first in of a series of 3d variants themed on various religions of history. (3x(9x9), Cells: 243) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Anu from M&B3 Ungulates gets used here. Anu is triangulating leaper. What does that mean? First, Anu is compound of Antelope and Namel. Antelope is regular 4,3 leaper, in the same line as my multi-path Scorpion. Namel is 7,1 leaper. Why connect those two? Because SOLLs are respectively 25 and 50. They are duals, and therefore triangulate, and so a natural pair. Triangulate here means make two Antelope jumps and then take a Namu jump right back where you started, if so occasioned. It's visualisable and far more usable than random compounds of leapers, and helps develop tight and right piece-type inter-connectivity throughout. Guru from the same M&B3 is here too. Guru is Giraffe + Gimel, who are 4,1 and 5,3. SOLLs 17 and 34. Get it? Get it right. There is no added difficulty with the 3-D aspect because they are stuck on their levels, the Anu and the Guru. No problem.
Actually of course, thanks to the 7,1 and 4,1 legs respectively, Namel and Guru are unbound by level.
Clarification of George Duke's comment: the Guru appears on the next page in the series, on a hex-level board where (like the similarly triangulating Nintu in this game) it can move only between levels.
Armies of Faith are different armies throughout the series. ''Different armies'' refers to a class of cvs after the idea of Betza CDA from 1977 to have equal-matched different forces two or more sides. Here are Mesopotanian army and Egyptian army different-forced. There are piece-types common to both, Egypt-specific pieces, and Mesopotamia-specific pieces. The intention would be for the total values about equal Egypt, Mesopotamia. Only the four stay the same in the later time-line also of Armies Faith including the stops after this ''Dawn of Civilisation'': Rook, King, Knight, Pawn. There is not exact correspondence to the 2^6 chess(es) out of India still played because the Faith cvs are 3-D, and there was hardly 3-D to speak of in the real world before 100-year-old Raumschach.
After much thought I now believe that I can make a major concession. I recall how much stick I got for clinging on to Ibis for the 8:1 leaper when problematists use it for the 5:1 one. Perhaps it is because both pieces are simple symmetric oblique leapers and confusion is a real possibility. I have devised a series of renamings that will eliminate my usage of Ibis - but first I must remove the piece from this variant. Now replacing it with another piece and naming that Ibis would not help as it would preserve the conflict, so that means having no piece called Ibis at all, in either this variant or Man and Beast. The ancient Egyptians did have frog-headed and lion-headed deities, but as those tended to be minor I decided to remove the Ibis without replacement and give both kinds of army the same number of pieces. To make up for the blockability of the Falcon and Jackal I will give the reduced Egyptian army the first move. I have decided to make a virtue of necessity and redesign the board without considering the needs of the Ibis piece. This also gives me the opportunity to (a) simplfy the board and remove concavities and (b) distance it further from Falcon Chess by having no dimension exceeding 9. I will keep everyone informed over the next few days as I progress through the changes, starting here.
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