Chris Tatham wrote:there is again plenty of room for improvement on the default (you can tweak away happily!)
Chris
Chessmaster 11 plays a
far more balanced game than previous versions and is quite humanlike with its style.
The thing that strikes me most is the huge emphasis on pawn structure. This leads to pawn chains and semi-closed and closed positions too much for my liking.
Although control of centre isn't too bad, I'd tend to tweak it up a little.
Likewise, although CM11 plays a much better endgame than its predecessors, it is still vulnerable to passed pawns, so that area needs tweaking too.
The control of centre and passed pawn factors often combine with centrally advanced passed pawns causing problems for CM11.
Mobility isn't too bad, but again I'd tend to tweak it a bit. Mobility is quite an important factor in engine v engine games particularly.
King safety doesn't seem too bad. I haven't seen CM11 swept away by too many direct assaults, but it still needs tightening up, again not a great deal seems necessary.
The difficult factor in tweaking these positional settings is in how much they need to be inflated relative to each other.
A better idea of this can only be developed through experimentation.
CM11 seems to value material more sensibly in that it doesn't give up a pawn as readily for positional considerations.
Therefore I feel that material values based around a pawn being worth 1.0 or 1.1 will be sufficient.
I still prefer to use the relative material values that I've come up with based on my extensive observation of engine v engine games.
The selectivity seems to make a major difference to performance based on Cock de Gorter's tireless efforts.
Selectivity 21 (!) seems to have the best results at this stage.
These are my first impressions and I could well be off the mark in by how much the various settings need to be tweaked, but here are my first two CM11 settings:
CM11 Silver Fern
CC = 105
Mob = 115
KS = 115
PP = 110
PW = 95
P = 1.0 (100)
N = 3.1 (103)
B = 3.1 (103)
R = 5.2 (104)
Q = 9.5 (106)
Sel = 21
CM11 Tomahawk
CC = 110
Mob = 120
KS = 120
PP = 115
PW = 100
P = 1.1 (110)
N = 3.4 (113)
B = 3.4 (113)
R = 5.8 (116)
Q = 10.6 (118)
Sel = 21