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How powerful is it for the Empowered Army to open by using knight-moves for their Empowered Rooks and/or Bishops?

In Chess 2: The Sequel, the knights, bishops, and rooks of the Empowered Army are considered empowered and can move as any adjacent empowered piece in addition to their own movement. To a beginner such as myself, it seems particularly strong to open by taking advantage of this by developing the empowered pieces immediately. All of the pieces can be developed through knight-moves in this way after a total of 6 moves.

1. Ra1 b3
2. Rh1 g3
3. Bc1 d3
4. Bf1 e3
5. Nb1 c3
6. Ng1 f3

Example

How strong is the use of empowered movement as opening moves? Should one focus on performing all 6 of these moves, or is it more sensible to do a subset of them? Is their an ideal order to these moves? Does the asymmetry of the King and Elegant Queen affect these things?

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  • I agree with Cleveland that I think pawns controlling the board and delimiting space would still be important. It looks like developing the Queen to the 2nd/3rd rank in a safe place behind the other pieces to empower them to move as a queen would also be of importance. The Knights would be appear to add great value to nearby pieces.
    – Alan
    Jul 16, 2014 at 16:50
  • @Alan I do not doubt the validity this recommendation, or the inferior quality of my baseline suggestion. However, I am hoping for even further detail.
    – Southpaw Hare
    Jul 16, 2014 at 16:58
  • I don't think anyone is even qualified to give further detail without playing some games in this variant. Your best bet to get a reasonable answer would be to pay a few strong chess players to play it a bunch against each other then give you their observations.
    – Cleveland
    Jul 16, 2014 at 19:00
  • @Cleveland I can wait. I'm sure there are people that already play it, and I'm sure more people will in the future. The video game version did just come out recently, after all.
    – Southpaw Hare
    Jul 16, 2014 at 19:08
  • @Alan, I believe the Queen moves as a King in this variant.
    – hkBst
    Feb 11, 2016 at 13:57

3 Answers 3

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I believe the optimum opening would be what Cleveland is suggesting. A combination of rook & knight with king & queen pawn @ d4 & e4, controlling the center. In the opening suggested in the example above, although it controls the center of the board, it restricts any immediate pathway for the king. In a game where one of the win conditions is crossing the middle of the board with your king, this may not be the best opening.

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My intuition might be totally off because this is very different from real chess, but I don't see why you wouldn't still want to try to control the center with pawns as white. You can develop all your pieces quickly this way but black can make a couple pawn moves (say, e5 and d5 while you are bringing your rooks out) then develop his own minor pieces to defend them. I wouldn't go with this opening strategy.

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2

Against Reaper in particular you might have problems with something like 1. ...Rhc3, blocking the knight from moving to c3 and making it arbitrarily hard to link up the Rook and Bishop.

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  • I believe other answerers should learn from this answer to not disregard the enemy army
    – hkBst
    Feb 11, 2016 at 13:56

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