It doesn’t seem right to me to give the king a long-range move. To end the game, the king needs every single one of its liberties to be blocked off, and the shape the liberties makes affects how enjoyable it can be to try and pin down a king—the shape of the orthodox king’s liberties is very pleasant to navigate (both as an attacker and defender), and I worry that buffing the king can end up with its liberties having a shape that isn’t fun to play with. If the king has too many liberties, then pinning it down can be like trying to hold water; it’s way too slippery.
The difficulty of checkmating a king increases exponentially as liberties increases—a naïve model: if any given square has probability p of being attacked by the opposing team or blocked, then there is a p^L probability of a king with L liberties being checkmated. Of course, this model isn’t realistic, but the pattern holds, so even just a few extra moves can go a long way for buffing the king.
I’m not keen on giving the king long-range moves either. It’s possible that if you don’t debuff the other pieces, nothing much like crazyhouse will fail to be terrifying in something like the way crazyhouse is.
I think you’re right that small increases in mobility can make a big difference to how hard to checkmate the king is. But the particular increase in mobility you’ve proposed doesn’t change anything at all while the king is on the back rank, and doesn’t change much while it’s on the second rank. In normal chess, and I think also in crazyhouse, the kings typically stay on the back rank for their own protection, at least until the endgame. Maaaaybe with the extra mobility the kings won’t need to stay hidden to the same extent, but I think being exposed is still going to be dangerous even for the enhanced king.
[Meta: I notice that in both of the threads where I’ve discussed things with you, all my comments have been downvoted. It looks as if the same has happened to other people who have posted comments disagreeing with things you’ve said. I find that, rationally or not, this makes me a bit reluctant to attempt to discuss anything with you. I suspect the effect on others may be the same. If you are indeed downvoting every comment you don’t agree with, you may wish to consider whether the effects of doing so are the ones you want. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m neither complaining nor objecting; a policy of downvoting things one disagrees with is perfectly permissible, although perhaps a bit rude. Also for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that you are downvoting every disagreeing comment; it looks that way but of course there are other possible explanations.]
I have downvoted a few, but certainly not all of the comments you made in response to me here and on my other recent post. On the other thread, I have downvoted comments that I both disagreed with, and felt were either too harsh or failed to understand what I was saying, without attempting to resolve potential miscommunications.
In the case of this particular comment, your comment was showing up at the top of the comments (due to your seniority on this site), but I felt that it wasn’t the comment that presented the most useful information, so I weak-downvoted it to allow other comments to gain more visibility. I don’t have any problem with the comment itself. Now that I say it, I’m not sure that I endorse that approach (not sure that I don’t, either, but I’ll reflect on this more tonight), but I definitely do apologize for any chilling effect that may have had, I feel bad that my approach has made you feel reluctant to engage in open conversation.
I will also note that there are several comments disagreeing with me on this post and the other one that I haven’t downvoted—there are only 4 other comments (aside from you) that I have downvoted between these two posts, 2 of which were unhelpful and had questionable tones, and have received downvotes from people other than me, and currently stand at negative karma. The other two posts I weak-downvoted for the same reason as this one—they appeared at the top of the comments by default, due to the user’s seniority giving their comments 2 karma by default, but which were not the most interesting comments.
It doesn’t seem right to me to give the king a long-range move. To end the game, the king needs every single one of its liberties to be blocked off, and the shape the liberties makes affects how enjoyable it can be to try and pin down a king—the shape of the orthodox king’s liberties is very pleasant to navigate (both as an attacker and defender), and I worry that buffing the king can end up with its liberties having a shape that isn’t fun to play with. If the king has too many liberties, then pinning it down can be like trying to hold water; it’s way too slippery.
The difficulty of checkmating a king increases exponentially as liberties increases—a naïve model: if any given square has probability p of being attacked by the opposing team or blocked, then there is a p^L probability of a king with L liberties being checkmated. Of course, this model isn’t realistic, but the pattern holds, so even just a few extra moves can go a long way for buffing the king.
I’m not keen on giving the king long-range moves either. It’s possible that if you don’t debuff the other pieces, nothing much like crazyhouse will fail to be terrifying in something like the way crazyhouse is.
I think you’re right that small increases in mobility can make a big difference to how hard to checkmate the king is. But the particular increase in mobility you’ve proposed doesn’t change anything at all while the king is on the back rank, and doesn’t change much while it’s on the second rank. In normal chess, and I think also in crazyhouse, the kings typically stay on the back rank for their own protection, at least until the endgame. Maaaaybe with the extra mobility the kings won’t need to stay hidden to the same extent, but I think being exposed is still going to be dangerous even for the enhanced king.
[Meta: I notice that in both of the threads where I’ve discussed things with you, all my comments have been downvoted. It looks as if the same has happened to other people who have posted comments disagreeing with things you’ve said. I find that, rationally or not, this makes me a bit reluctant to attempt to discuss anything with you. I suspect the effect on others may be the same. If you are indeed downvoting every comment you don’t agree with, you may wish to consider whether the effects of doing so are the ones you want. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m neither complaining nor objecting; a policy of downvoting things one disagrees with is perfectly permissible, although perhaps a bit rude. Also for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that you are downvoting every disagreeing comment; it looks that way but of course there are other possible explanations.]
I have downvoted a few, but certainly not all of the comments you made in response to me here and on my other recent post. On the other thread, I have downvoted comments that I both disagreed with, and felt were either too harsh or failed to understand what I was saying, without attempting to resolve potential miscommunications.
In the case of this particular comment, your comment was showing up at the top of the comments (due to your seniority on this site), but I felt that it wasn’t the comment that presented the most useful information, so I weak-downvoted it to allow other comments to gain more visibility. I don’t have any problem with the comment itself. Now that I say it, I’m not sure that I endorse that approach (not sure that I don’t, either, but I’ll reflect on this more tonight), but I definitely do apologize for any chilling effect that may have had, I feel bad that my approach has made you feel reluctant to engage in open conversation.
I will also note that there are several comments disagreeing with me on this post and the other one that I haven’t downvoted—there are only 4 other comments (aside from you) that I have downvoted between these two posts, 2 of which were unhelpful and had questionable tones, and have received downvotes from people other than me, and currently stand at negative karma. The other two posts I weak-downvoted for the same reason as this one—they appeared at the top of the comments by default, due to the user’s seniority giving their comments 2 karma by default, but which were not the most interesting comments.