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Greg Strong wrote on Wed, Apr 5, 2017 04:27 AM UTC:

Hi Nick,

Good questions.  I don't believe there are, as yet, definitive answers to them, but I'll take a shot ...

The relative balance of the armies is a topic of some disagreement.  I think it is fair to say that they are not perfectly balanced, but they are probably within one pawn.  I believe I remember Fergus saying he conisdered the Nutty Knights to be the strongest army.  David Paulowich, a very strong player, considered the Remarkable Rookies to be the most powerful.  I, personally, think the Colorbound Clobberers might be strongest, so long as they can avoid getting their extreme colorboundness exploited (they start with four colorbound pieces, if they get down to only two, but both on the same color, they are in trouble.)

I also think the strength of individual pieces definitely depends to some extent on what other pieces are on the board.  Therefore, the armies have a sort of Rock-Paper-Scissors effect where an army can be better against one type of army than another.  I was doing some in-depth computer analysis to try to determine this, but I stopped part-way through and it was a long time ago.  If I remember correctly, I was beginning to think that the Rookies may be the best for countering the Clobberers, and the Knight may be best for countering the Rookies.  But don't put too much faith in that.  In one of the most recent comments, H. G. Muller provides a chart of win/loss percentages of the various army matchups based on large numbers of games with Fairy-Max.  That's the best we have to go on now, but even that should not be considered definitive.  The problem with computer analysis is that it is applying the evaluation terms we programmers provide.  Automated tuning is possible, but requires a ton of games and is still limited.  And there probably should be other evaluation terms we haven't included at all because we don't know we need them, e.g., a huge penalty for the clobberers having only two colorbound pieces on the same color.  We have a similar 'two bishops' bonus in orthodox chess because we know it works and we know how big it should be.  But we don't know what we need here and computers are difficult to use to find it - kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.  But, in any event, the four official armies are close enough for a fun, fair, friendly game between human players.  If we had a library of thousands of expert games like we have in orthodox chess, however, we might well determine that an army is at a significant disadvantage.  Also note that the experimental armies are very uncertain.  The Meticulous Mashers, for instance, is way over-powered and should not be used except in a handicap game.

If I ever became ambitious and maybe decided to come up with my own army (loosely translated to "if I ever have to time"), what are the processes to do this.

Well, you can always do what others have done and just post it :)  There is no official process.  If you have an idea, start a thread and get feedback.  I can be of assistance with some basic computer testing if the pieces aren't too radical.  This is limited, as already mentioned, but can identify some that are way out-of-whack.  (It didn't take too much testing to determine that the mashers were far out of balance.)

Personally, one thing I frequently aim for when designing a variant is multiple different types of pieces with roughly the same material value.  This encourages uneven exchanges, leading to more different-army match-ups despite starting with the same armies (and thus avoiding the whole sticky question of balance.)  For an example, look at Opulent Chess.  It has four different piece types, the Bishop, Wizard, Lion, and Knight (which is augmented), which all have roughly the same material value.


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