[Chess 2] Empowered defense against Reaper

General Discussion
41

Not that I suggest taking it back, but could you tell me what black would have done other than kd6 if I had had be3 one turn earlier instead of kf2?

42

Still would have done Kd6

43

Nxf5 (stones 1-4 before capture)

44

no duel, bf4.

45

Kc6 (Stones 1-5)

EDIT: it looks like the botā€™s reaction to most of your possible moves will be f8g6, so please provide a followup to that.

46

First to stop the king. I think it makes little difference, but I am not a computer. Nc3. Then your bishop move, followed by my own endgame push of Kf3.

47

Nf6

48

It is very complex and I am no longer confident in my victory, but I still think it is possible, and I suppose the fact that I am not confident is a good thing for Chess 2 in general. In many ways it often comes down to the duel: if I had one more stone things would have been very different.

e5.

49

I donā€™t understand any of this but it is REALLY COOL!

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50

Bh5+

And plan for a likely Nh4 followupā€¦

51

The only moves that are available to me is basically taking the bishop with the queen and blocking the bishop with the ghost. The AI seems to think that I will block with the ghost, and I looked at that and it goes very badly for me very quickly. I prefer to finally sacrifice the reaper.

QxB. If a duel, I will bid 0. If you want to still move to Nh4 then by all means my follow up move will be Kg3 :smiley:

@mysticjuicer Iā€™m glad you are enjoying the game!

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52

The bot duels and since he would bid 2 here 87% of the time, Iā€™m going to go ahead and just do 2 instead of the normal ā€œbest for blackā€ moving of bidding 1. We can revisit if needed. That would put stones at 1-2.

Black then does Rxb2. You donā€™t have enough stones to duel. Stones are 1-3.

53

Bg3, with the most likely follow up move being Kf4. I donā€™t really see what black can do in this situation, but Iā€™ve been surprised before.

55

Rb4

The bot is >90% confident that Black wins from here.

56

yeah, I saw this move after posting my confident reply. I didnā€™t know how to fight against it. I ran down trying to use the other ghost, but it was needed to push the win.

I am going to surrender here. Great game! I guess the point of this was not to play a game but to find out if empowered can defend itself, and I saw a lot of scenarios were I could have won, but of course that is predicated on the opponent making mistakes.

Were there any clear mistakes that you think I made? Do you want to go down any specific alternative pathway?

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57

Iā€™m not good enough at chess to say anything was a mistake. I could go back and check specific moves if youā€™re interested. Iā€™m only going off memory but there were several times where the bot was expecting a different reply, most notably bringing your b1 knight out earlier.

At this point Iā€™m more interested in investigating reaper vs classic. Iā€™m going to start a new topic on that now.

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58

Empowered Rg6 is definitely a pain in the ass! At some point Iā€™m going to have to mess with it even more since I realllllly wanna break it, but from the looks of things itā€™s just typically going to lead to some complex stuff. Not my forte!

Against human players I might consider just doing Reaper Rg6 on turn one though haha. The problem with that is, itā€™s one of the only times where my previous training partner and I found a line that looks like a stable defense for Empowered.

  1. rg6 f5
  2. re6 (maybe rh6 is justifiable though which could be extremely important) d5 (maybe this is problematic for black since having two reaperable pawns is really bad)
  3. f4 bd6
  4. kf2 rf7
  5. kg3 nd7
  6. kh4 nf6

possibly it would play out way differently though since ā€˜just develop all the queenside pieces instantlyā€™ was so successful in this thread. maybe empowered can just do that and be okay without having the instant second rook.

59

How about some Animals played next time? :smiley: