H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Oct 1, 2016 12:02 PM UTC:
The eagerness of Fairy-Max to advance its Pawns is controlled by the scaling of the piece values. Large value of the total board content discourages Pawn pushing, and would keep the position more closed. You should realize that Fairy-Max is an extremely simplistic engine, almost completely devoid of any kind of knowledge. Pawn structures are only evaluated in a very crude way. (I.e. pushing a Pawn is in principle encouraged over other moves, but gets a penaly if there is no Pawn 2 squares left or right from the square thePawn comes from, becauseit would then give up control over the squares diagonally in front of it. That is really all it knows (and it backfires with Berolina Paws), except that 6th and 7th rank Pawns get a 64 and 128 value increase. I am not even sure the latter works in Apothecary, with its 3-deep zone. )
As to the Nightrider: even when pitted against Rook with still a lot of Pawns on the board (4 or 5 on each side) the Nightrider seemed to have the advantage. Nightriders used to be a bit problematic for Fairy-Max, because they can cause mutual perpetual checking, and Fairy-Max would crash on positions where that occurs. (I am not sure if the 5.0 version still has that problem.) But with just a single Nightrider there were no problems.
The eagerness of Fairy-Max to advance its Pawns is controlled by the scaling of the piece values. Large value of the total board content discourages Pawn pushing, and would keep the position more closed. You should realize that Fairy-Max is an extremely simplistic engine, almost completely devoid of any kind of knowledge. Pawn structures are only evaluated in a very crude way. (I.e. pushing a Pawn is in principle encouraged over other moves, but gets a penaly if there is no Pawn 2 squares left or right from the square thePawn comes from, becauseit would then give up control over the squares diagonally in front of it. That is really all it knows (and it backfires with Berolina Paws), except that 6th and 7th rank Pawns get a 64 and 128 value increase. I am not even sure the latter works in Apothecary, with its 3-deep zone. )
As to the Nightrider: even when pitted against Rook with still a lot of Pawns on the board (4 or 5 on each side) the Nightrider seemed to have the advantage. Nightriders used to be a bit problematic for Fairy-Max, because they can cause mutual perpetual checking, and Fairy-Max would crash on positions where that occurs. (I am not sure if the 5.0 version still has that problem.) But with just a single Nightrider there were no problems.