So, I just removed odd variants. Reason: too much hassle, for no real gains.
Sure it sounds impressive when I casually mention I have 20 different variants, but do I really? Except from missing Queens and pair of Pawns, how much meaningful differences there are from parent, even variant? Having more light fields then dark ones certainly isn't meaningful in my book. In fact, it's problematic since one Bishop has advantage over the other. Nor is it the fact that in odd variants all Stars lie on light fields, preventing dark-field Bishops to teleport at all.
Which bring me to the initial setup. I somewhat naively thought that just removing Queens and Pawns will do. Nope. That would leave both Bishops on light fields. So, one of them has to change places with Knight.
Then, there is a slight issue of Pegasus attacking opponent's figures, right from the initial positions. Oki, move it so that figure under attack is of lesser value, preferably defended. This works, until Star is introduced in Nineteen variant, because Stars has to be in the very corners of a chessboard, and Rooks has to be positioned next to them. Which now means, Pegasus has to move much closer to King, and other figures has to be rearranged as well, to prevent it capturing anything valuable.
And so on, and so forth. By the time Centaur is introduced, all hell breaks loose, and remedy to that was to introduce initial setups which are completely different than those for parent, even variants. In short, ugly and ungainly.
I also removed castling from converted opponent's Rooks, and rushing from converted opponent's Pawns. When I was introducing this rule, I was thinking solely in terms of interactions (conversions on initial positions), and natural consequences of those (earning to rush, castle). However, sometimes just reasoning behind an original rule (speeding-up game opening, protecting King in early game) clarifies if it should be an option in some other settings.
Since these are significant changes, I have also updated book preview:
806 ··· 2020-11-29 09:47:59 UTC ··· master.
As for plans, I added TODO for alternate move for Serpent, sacrifice of Pawns, at the moment I'm still pondering how it should work. The same pondering thing I have about One variant, and Starchild. While I have great expectations from these, can't yet figure it out how they should look like. This is why, I might start something else, like take time to learn Rust, and start coding. So, if there aren't many updates in the near future, don't worry, I'm still on it.
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