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H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2016 06:45 PM UTC:

Well, for a totally new variant with many new pieces it is usually necessary to do more than one iteration anyway, because your initial guessed piece values were off too much. I still expect the extra ranks behind the pieces to have little effect on piece values, so that the Capablanca-Chess values would seem a reasonable first guess. These are Q=950, C=900, A=875, R=500, B=370 (350, really, but 40 extra for a Bishop pair, but Fairy-Max is too crude to make a difference between first and second Bishop, so I just take the average), N=300, P=80.

As you pointed out the Apothecary Knight has extra moves, however, and an educated guess would be 360 for a Knight with 4 extra non-captures, and 430 for one with 8 extra non-captures. Enhanced Camels and Zebras would be similar, but I really have no idea whether they would be worse or better than the enhanced Knight. Normally long strides are worth less, because the go off-board more easily, and make for very awkward manoeuvring. But it is mostly non-captures you need for manoeuvring, and distant captures might actually be more effective than close ones.

Champion and Wizard I would guess as 480 and 640 just based on the number of squares they attack. Although I have no idea how color binding affects the Wizard.

Note that the programmed values are not extremely critical. If two pieces are close, it often does not matter for the result which one you value higher. So rather than doing everything again (perhaps with the values of other pieces still wrong), I would first try some other tests to make sure all pieces have been given reasonable values. E.g. test if a Wizard is bettwre or weaker than a Bishop pair,and whether a Champion is weaker or stronger than a Rook. And how two Apothecary Knights fair against a Bishop pair.


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