Double-Check/Triple-Check Points

Well maybe
a) you don't have many other options and the only pawn you can take means you lose a pawn

b) you can take a piece and double check - so you get both points

But I agree maybe a double-check should be worth a little more - 2pts maybe. But if taking a King is worth 3pts then you can't really make double check worth more than a checkmate can you? Seems a bit silly

Definitely +1

There are many good points and important topics in this thread.

How are decisions actually made? I won’t got into detail here, but I think what one should keep in mind is all the admins are volunteers, working for free out of our own interest. Although technically there are also a couple of staff members, I’d say decisions are mainly driven by certain admins’ passion to see them through. It also depends a lot on what we can expect from the IT developers, they are the ones sitting on the executive power, without them there would never be any improvements or changes. Sometimes admins make decisions by voting.

What I said got somewhat misinterpreted, I believe. When I said “best trades overall”, that includes cases where for example you get material for free, which sort of removes the cap for how good a trade can be. Say you get to grab a free bishop with your rook, but are then forced to trade your rook for another rook, you got 10 points worth for that rook, one could say. Trades don’t always occur one piece for one piece. Putting your pieces one active squares increases the chance of getting to grab free material.

Now, what I feel people often sort of think intuitively in this discussion, but isn’t necessarily true, is that dead players should finish last. In fact, a key idea behind having a point system is to counter this survival mechanism. You can die first and still win. Perhaps this seems counter intuitive, but to me it is a beautiful concept. What matters isn’t how long you live, but how much you were able to do while you were alive. I use the term “to die” here about the game because it simpler than for example “to get checkmated”, which isn’t accurate in fiesta anyways.

If I interpret your example correctly, you have case with two players who are down to bare kings, and one player with more material that has less points than the other two. So he needs double checks to catch up. Then indeed the two kings should suicide and get 1^st and 2^nd. However, what about this scenario: One player plays aggressively in the opening, gets a lot of material, but loses all his pieces in the process. He gets 30 points, but since he only has the king left, he has no way to ensure his own survival, and quickly loses his king. The remaining three players have about 5 points each. The total number of points in the starting position is 21*4=84. In my opinion, if the game is functioning well, the dead player should finish in a decent position here on average, because he has more points than his army was worth in the beginning. And while there is certainly a luck factor in how well you can trade, a bigger luck factor in my opinion is whether you can survive longer than your opponents. But the existence of double checks makes it so that the three remaining players in my example can simply promote pawns into more valuable rooks, give some double checks and proceed to trade rooks, and thus the dead player always finishes 4^th, no matter his score. This is in the interest of all 3 remaining players. Now this is not something that players would do currently chaturaji, because most players haven’t learned to consider to cooperate in the endgame yet. But in the future, in slower time controls, with higher level of play, this scenario will become more common, as long as double checks and promoting into higher value pieces are available options in the endgame.

That said, in hyper fiesta I don’t think there is a problem with double and triple checks being valuable, they could even be 100 and 1000 points respectively. The game would still “work”, because of the time constraint. In that case, points for pieces would only work as a tiebreaker.

Anyways, I think the pawn promotion is a bigger issue than double checks in chaturaji right now. A compromise with double checks on 2 or 3 points would be fine with me. Topics for future discussions is if there should be points for double and triple checks at all, or if there should be other ways to get points, like achievements (capturing streaks, promoting all your pawns, filling an entire file with your own pieces, there are many possibilities here). Indeed popularity and balance are two key components when the admins choose to implement things, but the main thing, as I said, is whether the developers want to do it.

Side note on the king value: I’ve done piece value experiments on chaturaji that imply that the king could be worth more than 3 points, as it is a fairly powerful piece on such a small board (compared to standard 4pc). 20 points is too much though, I think. Could be 5 points, for instance. For now we’re trying to keep the same piece values across all variants for he sake of simplicity, but I can only imagine that if a certain variant becomes big enough, it’d be reasonable to adjust the piece values in that specific variant.

A different idea for a compromise is to rather than reduce the points for each double check, reduce the amount of times you can get points for double checks. This way it becomes a finite resource, while still being impactful. For instance: 5 points for the first two double checks, then 0 points for all double checks after that. 

Triple checks are extremely hard to get, if we deem them worth as much as capturing a hanging bishop or rook that would be stupid. They should be at least 8 points. Double checks at 3 points sounds reasonable

sounds great

lol, are people expected to keep count in a 15 second game?

ig there could be a counter for each person off to the side