Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To Jeremy Lennert wrote on Wed, Sep 21, 2011 12:31 AM UTC:In a FIDE-like game, I would expect the Immortal to be much weaker than the Mamra, which does not require support to pass through a threatened square (as long as the threat does not come from a pawn) and can easily checkmate the enemy King completely unaided (and regardless of any non-pawn defenders). The page you link advocates sacrificing a Queen and a Rook to create a hole in the opponent's pawn wall through which the Mamra can charge, which suggests the Mamra is worth significantly more than a Queen (and that wouldn't surprise me in the least). The Immortal poses no remotely comparable threat that I can see. However, the Mamra's value probably varies wildly depending on the other pieces on the board, both because it is a highly specialized piece and because it is vulnerable only to a specific type of enemy piece. The Immortal's value also probably varies more than most, but not to the same extent. Relying *entirely* on testing to balance a piece is 'brute force' in the sense that it makes no attempt to leverage information unique to the piece being tested, and is not even CLOSE to the speed or accuracy you suggest. What you describe, where you 'estimate' (by unspecified means) a value that is somehow magically within +/- 1.0 pawns initially and even more magically within +/- 0.5 pawns the next game is not balancing based on testing, it's balancing based on intuition (with exceedingly optimistic estimates of accuracy). Intuition occasionlly works very well but often fails catastrophically and is completely irreproducible. And yes, that is no doubt the primary means by which most CVs are balanced, but I was hoping for something a little more insightful. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Immortal Value does not match any item.