Alexander Schmidt wrote:Does your engines get that position?
My engines get all positions for the variants they play. I would of course not lower myself to writing an engine for something as ugly as FRC, no matter how little effort it takes to add those castling rules to my normal Chess engines. So I only wrote engines for Chess, Xiangqi, Shogi, Makruk, 10x8 Chess, Knightmate, Shatranj, Courier Chess, SuperChess, Great Shatranj, and now Spartan Chess...
How is your engine doing on that position, btw?
I looked at other variants and I don't like them. Standart chess is a positional game, it is some kind of art. The only problem is the huge theory. So FRC is the alternative.
Other variants are (so far) only tactical slugfests. Maybe interesting to play a few games. But in decades this variants will not become as aesthetic as regular chess.
Well, you know what they say: it takes time to understand the strategy of a game, and before you do any game looks more tactical than strategic. I don't know which variants you have seen, but there are many variants that are qualitatively very similar to orthodox Chess (but without opening theory). For instance Chancelor Chess or Archbishop Chess, where you replace the Queen by a nearly equally powerful piece with a different gait. Or Knightmate, where you merely swap the moves of Knight and King (two approximately equally powerful pieces) The parameters of these variants are so similar to those of orthodox Chess, that they simply must have the same tactical vs. strategic content. So what you say is simply not true, and can only stem from ignorance.
