Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
(BTW, it is an interesting question how a hopper should be handled that passes though the brake zone. I suppose it should be able to hop over a mount there; but should such a square count as a mount when it is empty?)
I personally would answer this as a "no." I've generally regarded the hop as a bypass to a specific target, and in the case of a brake spell there's no target.
My question is: should a brake affect a rifle capture? I'd also say "no" to this on principle, but I'm not sure you could program the ID to recognize the "cab" string as "immune to brake."
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Sep 23, 2023 03:50 PM UTC in reply to Bob Greenwade from 03:06 PM:My question is: should a brake affect a rifle capture? I'd also say "no" to this on principle, but I'm not sure you could program the ID to recognize the "cab" string as "immune to brake."
I guess this brings us back to the distinction between 'shooters' and 'tramplers', as the two classes of pieces that can make locust captures. The Chu-Shogi Lion, or Checkers obviously are tramplers: they visit their victim on the way to their destination. (Even though for the Lion the destination need not be on the other side, the rules describe the move as two King moves per turn.) Shooters, such as the Forest Ox from Odin's Rune Chess, or the Advancer, would first go to their destination, and destroy the piece from there without moving. (Even though the XBetza description might formulate it differently. It is very confusing for the user when on entering Forest-Ox moves you have to click the locust victim first.)
If trampling is the result of double moving, it would be logical to apply the brake spell to each leg of the move individually. So then the Lion would have no problem with rifle-capturing something inside the zone.
For pure rifle capture I suppose this cannot be decided on the basic of logic; you could specify the rule either way, even for victime that ly beyond the zone. That you can stop soldiers does not imply you can stop bullets. It is really an independent property. There could be a fog spell that prevents rifle capturers from seeing their target when the shot crosses the zone.
I do draw a distinction between rifle and locust captures; that's why I specified cab as the trigger string (though I think it's actually caib for sliding atoms).
But that fog spell sounds like a winner to me. It'd be a good counter against pieces like my Sniper (the (0,5)(3,4) rifle capturer).
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I made a small change to the Interactive Diagram: the brake spell, which was implemented as what in earlier discussions we called catch + freeze, now only does the catch part. I am not aware of any variant that would use catch + freeze; when I implemented spells I just had this vague idea in the back of my mind that I had seen something like catch somewhere. Which was probably for Hiashatar, so I just had misremembered how exactly that worked.
So from now on spell=brake activates the more elementary effect that sliders treat squares in the (opponent's) spell zone as if these contain enemy pieces: they can go there, but not beyond that. This way I could use the brake spell to implement the Hia in this variant. Variants that would need catch in combination with other spells will have to wait until the Diagram can handle multiple spells, and combine those.
(BTW, it is an interesting question how a hopper should be handled that passes though the brake zone. I suppose it should be able to hop over a mount there; but should such a square count as a mount when it is empty?)
I also added some code to view the captureMatrix; if one is defined, the full matrix will now be displayed under the Diagram's legend, which will appear the second time you click 'here' in the sentence below the board. This already helped me detect and remove a bug in the Minjiku Shogi Diagram: the Fire Dragon did not burn when capturing a Jumping General, Area General or other Fire Dragon, because there weren't enough burn indicators (@) in the row of the Fire Dragon. (Probably because I added pieces when changing promotions.)