You raise a valid point.
Balancing automate
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Yes, the game is inbalanced ... The price of the rook should be lower, the price of the knight also should be higher at least half point or equal with bishops. And using half points is not that bad thing, for example using half points to reposition a placed piece is a nice feature, rearranging the structure against the opponent for not used points. It's a little bit too fixed in this state, the half point rearrange is a must feature.
see this game about 252 move it draw but very shame the computer don't know how play end game.
Interesting variant. I would have expected that picking as many of the lightest pieces as possible would give the best army. I know for sure that 7 Knights easily beat 3 Queens, in the presence of (equal numbers) of Pawns. So 8 Pawns + 9 Knights seems a good choice. Or perhaps even 14 Pawns + 7 Knights.
Could be that Stockfish is a very poor player with these unusual material compositions, though. In the 3Q vs 7N game, last time I tried it, it thinks it is at something like +8.5 for the Queens, which is a pretty large misevaluation for a position that is dead lost.
Hi everyone,
I've been playing a lot of automate recently and I love the format, but what I've noticed is that any setup with queens + knights seems to be noticeably stronger than others. There is really no reason to pick a rook when the queen is only worth 2 extra points (7 vs. 5), making a queen a supreme bargain, while the same is true for a knight versus a bishop (3 versus 4). No criticism to the designers here - finding piece values that are balanced is without a doubt not an easy task.
While I didn't play during this period, I understand that the reason the prices are as such was that before someone could just use all bishops when they were worth 3 points, and that this would mean that bishops were dominant. So it's clear that when bishops are worth 3, they're much stronger than knights, but when they are worth 4, knights are much better.
How about making the bishops worth 3.5? It seems like this would strike a counterbalance between the two points.
I also think a queen should be worth 8 points. This would make rooks a viable option to choose.
What does everyone think? I'm clearly not the best automate player - the dominance of queens and knights is just what I've observed. Please let me know if you have additional feedback!