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hi christine, it's just that i playtested it several times with the pawns
on the 3rd rank... and it would push up against the 50 turn limit... which
was a concern... not so much that 50 turns was set in stone, but that i
wanted consistently shorter games than that... so i moved the pawns up to
the 4th rank to speed things up... then larry's research with the
zillions-of-games engine indicated that maybe the 50-turn limit wasn't a
problem, particularly when splitting two of the artillery out to the outer
files... by pulling the pawns back, but splitting the outside artillery
out, it gives the generals early openings, very similar in that respect to
the version you're playing... now i'm wondering... what about... pawns on
the 3rd ranks, artillery split out... but give the colonels a 3-square
instead of 2-square move?... the thing which larry mentioned about pulling
the soldiers (pawns) back was that he was seeing a lot more
'military-type' formations as the game had a bit more time to develop...
but like i said, maybe i will have to revisit that... the program as i have
it is all written, changing the starting spots is just minor tweaking....
same for changing the colonels to 3-square-movers... so maybe i should
leave it open-ended for now... see if any more people weigh in on this...
thanks again for the feedback