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I completed some more test games, and in the mean time made some
improvements on WinBoard and Fairy-Max:
*) Better notation: there was really no need to write moves that WB thought
were illegal in long-algebraic notation: Xa1 is always unambiguous when
there is only one X on the board. So SAN is used more often now
*) I changed the spear from being a wild-card piece to the exact moves of
the Hoplite Pawn (and in the future might also use it in variant Berolina).
So those now produce perfect SAN moves.
*)I let Fairy-Max send a command to WinBoard telling it the
piece-to-character table and the opening array, so that it is no longer
needed to provide these externally (on command line or in a .ini file). As
a consequence it does not require any preparation to play Spartan Chess; it
can be selected from the menus in a standard distribution. One just would
have to select 'Spartan' in the combo-box of the 'Engine #1 Settings'
dialog as the variant to masquerade as 'fairy', and then select 'fairy'
from the 'new variant' menu dialog, and the Spartan setup will appear. No
Spartan.fen and Spartan.ini files are needed for this (although I still
provide them, as well as the shortcut).
As to the piece values: I did several tests, and came out approximately as
I expected:
*) C ~ N
*) G+C > Q
*) G <~ B+B+P
*) K > B+P
*) K <~ R
Captain and Knight are really very close, and it would probably be best
strategy to treat them as exactly equal (keeping in mind that treating a
piece like it is better, i.e. having to avoid trading it, makes the piece
worth less). The spare Spartan King is actualy worth a bit more than I had
guessed. It is really very close to Rook.
The upgraded software is still at http://hgm.nubati.net/Spartan.zip .