Complete Cyvasse Rules

[MikeL]

Awesome to hear MichaelMurphree. I'd love to see this on an iPad. I've been messing around with some simple icons for the pieces which are looking ok but I haven't finished the set yet.

For the record, Zuberi originally referenced the book to say there are 10 pieces (wiki agrees with this). He interpreted that to mean 1) Mountain 2) Rabble 3) King 4) Light Horse 5) Spearman 6) Crossbowman (which I changed to Archer later in the thread just because I liked the name better and strategically they would be used in the same way - I think it should be one or the other, not both) 7) Heavy Horse 8) Elephant 9) Trebuchet and 10) Dragon. The fortress is not a piece but a space which can be occupied by all others. I'm not sure why you (LB) changed it so a Dragon cannot enter the enemy fortress - I'm assuming because it was too easy to win. Maybe the winning condition should be that the enemy fortress has to be occupied by some piece other than the dragon, but I see no reason why the Dragon couldn't be sent in to defeat whatever piece is in the fortress.

Quick idea about use of the fortress in promoting pieces - why not make it go all the way down the line? If you have no King, you can use the fortress to promote a tier 3 piece (heavy horse, elephant, trebuchet) to King. If you have less than a full complement of tier 3 pieces (i.e. I still think this number should be 7) you can use the fortress to promote a tier 2 piece to its corresponding tier 3 piece (light horse -> heavy horse, spearman -> elephant, archer -> trebuchet). Likewise if you have less than 7 tier 2 pieces, promote a rabble to a tier 2 piece of your choice. The restriction is always that you can only have a maximum of 3 of each piece (this limitation is because one day it would be cool to see an actual, physical set). That would solve your problem with having dragons and no other pieces at the end. This would also make the loss of the king even more devastating, since you lose all your rabble (your potential future pieces).

Because this game is not RTS, but turn based, the movements of the pieces are not necessarily going to be "realistic", but representative of the power they have. From the books, the Dragon is clearly meant to be the most powerful piece, but also vulnerable on a crowded board. The inexperienced player might try to send their dragon in after the opposing king too early, and a good defence should be able to not just stop it, but trap it. I'm not quite sure how this will ever be possible with the set up as it is. In hex chess, the queen is very mobile, but can still be captured by a pawn. If the dragon is not able to be captured by rabble (and I don't think this should be possible) I think we have to find a different scheme of movement from hex chess. Otherwise the dragon is just too powerful.

Here's the movement scheme I've been thinking (The first 8 are actually what I think you're saying LB but in my words :P all the other terms you made up confused me a bit). Let me know what you think:

1) Mountain: stationary.

2) Rabble (tier 1): Moves 1 hex orthogonally.

3) King (tier 1*): Moves 1 hex orthogonally.

4) Light Horse (tier 2, scissors): Moves 2 diagonally.

5) Spearman (tier 2, rock): Moves 3 orthogonally.

6) Archer (tier 2, paper): Range of 2 orthogonally, 3 when capturing. Can change direction mid move. Can "jump" other pieces but not mountains.

7) Heavy Horse (tier 3, scissors): diagonal to board limits (no mountain crossing).

8) Elephant (tier 3, rock): orthogonal to board limits (no mountain crossing).

9) Trebuchet (tier 3, paper): Range of 3 orthogonally, 4 when capturing. Can change direction mid move. Can "jump" over other pieces/mountains.

10) Dragon** (tier 4). Range of 7 orthogonally. Can change direction mid move. Can "jump" mountains but not other pieces.

One thing to note with the Heavy Horse move is that with the 7-a-side hexagonal board, all the corner hexes are now the same colour and a Heavy Horse which is initially positioned on this colour hex is heavily advantaged because of the "sea port" function. (Did you manage to incorporate that into your program by the way?)

I think the rock scissors paper (RSP) dynamic is cool, but should be limited to one on one encounters within pieces of the same tier group (that means that even though a light horse can't take spearmen, a heavy horse should be able to). I really don't want to have to think too hard about a points scoring system like I was with Zuberi's, and I hope with my other suggestions we can drop the restriction that the flanking pieces need to be the same tier or RSP group as the attacker. I think if flanking is involved the RSP should cease to be relevant.

Flanking only increases the strength of the attacking force - the definition of a flanking piece is one capable of moving into the captured space. To take down a dragon, you should only need to have any two tier 3 pieces, any one tier 3 piece PLUS two tier 2 pieces, or (assuming someone is stupid enough to put their dragon in this position) a tier 3 piece plus four tier 1 (e.g. 4x rabble+1xElephant). If the dragon gets cornered (and I think the sea ports could be really useful in this), it will be able to flee over mountains, and move between and around pieces, but in this case the strength is balanced by the range being somewhat less than the Heavy Horse and Elephant.

Time for me to go to bed. Chat to you later :)

[LordBiscuit]

For the record, Zuberi originally referenced the book to say there are 10 pieces (wiki agrees with this). He interpreted that to mean 1) Mountain 2) Rabble 3) King 4) Light Horse 5) Spearman 6) Crossbowman (which I changed to Archer later in the thread just because I liked the name better and strategically they would be used in the same way - I think it should be one or the other, not both) 7) Heavy Horse 8) Elephant 9) Trebuchet and 10) Dragon. The fortress is not a piece but a space which can be occupied by all others. I'm not sure why you (LB) changed it so a Dragon cannot enter the enemy fortress - I'm assuming because it was too easy to win. Maybe the winning condition should be that the enemy fortress has to be occupied by some piece other than the dragon, but I see no reason why the Dragon couldn't be sent in to defeat whatever piece is in the fortress.

I can’t believe I overlooked the Archer/Xbowman thing. If the piece is called an Xbowman, that’s what it’s going to be called in the game.

As for Dragon not entering fortresses. If you give the defending piece +1, and you put your dragon there, your fortress can’t be taken

Quick idea about use of the fortress in promoting pieces - why not make it go all the way down the line? If you have no King, you can use the fortress to promote a tier 3 piece (heavy horse, elephant, trebuchet) to King. If you have less than a full complement of tier 3 pieces (i.e. I still think this number should be 7) you can use the fortress to promote a tier 2 piece to its corresponding tier 3 piece (light horse -> heavy horse, spearman -> elephant, archer -> trebuchet). Likewise if you have less than 7 tier 2 pieces, promote a rabble to a tier 2 piece of your choice. The restriction is always that you can only have a maximum of 3 of each piece (this limitation is because one day it would be cool to see an actual, physical set). That would solve your problem with having dragons and no other pieces at the end. This would also make the loss of the king even more devastating, since you lose all your rabble (your potential future pieces).

I like that. I’ll implement it soon

Because this game is not RTS, but turn based, the movements of the pieces are not necessarily going to be "realistic", but representative of the power they have. From the books, the Dragon is clearly meant to be the most powerful piece, but also vulnerable on a crowded board. The inexperienced player might try to send their dragon in after the opposing king too early, and a good defence should be able to not just stop it, but trap it. I'm not quite sure how this will ever be possible with the set up as it is. In hex chess, the queen is very mobile, but can still be captured by a pawn. If the dragon is not able to be captured by rabble (and I don't think this should be possible) I think we have to find a different scheme of movement from hex chess. Otherwise the dragon is just too powerful.

Here's the movement scheme I've been thinking (The first 8 are actually what I think you're saying LB but in my words all the other terms you made up confused me a bit). Let me know what you think:

1) Mountain: stationary.

2) Rabble (tier 1): Moves 1 hex orthogonally.

3) King (tier 1*): Moves 1 hex orthogonally.

4) Light Horse (tier 2, scissors): Moves 2 diagonally.

5) Spearman (tier 2, rock): Moves 3 orthogonally.

6) Archer (tier 2, paper): Range of 2 orthogonally, 3 when capturing. Can change direction mid move. Can "jump" other pieces but not mountains.

7) Heavy Horse (tier 3, scissors): diagonal to board limits (no mountain crossing).

8) Elephant (tier 3, rock): orthogonal to board limits (no mountain crossing).

9) Trebuchet (tier 3, paper): Range of 3 orthogonally, 4 when capturing. Can change direction mid move. Can "jump" over other pieces/mountains.

10) Dragon** (tier 4). Range of 7 orthogonally. Can change direction mid move. Can "jump" mountains but not other pieces.

The Trebuchet might be a bit too powerful with capturing distance 4. I think 3 with jumping over mountains is enough.

Also, making the dragon’s movement method to “speed” is a good change I was thinking about as well, but I was thinking about 4. 7 is too much IMO.

One thing to note with the Heavy Horse move is that with the 7-a-side hexagonal board, all the corner hexes are now the same colour and a Heavy Horse which is initially positioned on this colour hex is heavily advantaged because of the "sea port" function. (Did you manage to incorporate that into your program by the way?)

No, I didn’t. I didn’t really like the idea, hence why I excluded it from my own rules set.

I think the rock scissors paper (RSP) dynamic is cool, but should be limited to one on one encounters within pieces of the same tier group (that means that even though a light horse can't take spearmen, a heavy horse should be able to). I really don't want to have to think too hard about a points scoring system like I was with Zuberi's, and I hope with my other suggestions we can drop the restriction that the flanking pieces need to be the same tier or RSP group as the attacker. I think if flanking is involved the RSP should cease to be relevant.

A heavy horse could already capture a spearman. -1 or not, it’s still of the same or a higher tier.

Flanking only increases the strength of the attacking force - the definition of a flanking piece is one capable of moving into the captured space. To take down a dragon, you should only need to have any two tier 3 pieces, any one tier 3 piece PLUS two tier 2 pieces, or (assuming someone is stupid enough to put their dragon in this position) a tier 3 piece plus four tier 1 (e.g. 4x rabble+1xElephant). If the dragon gets cornered (and I think the sea ports could be really useful in this), it will be able to flee over mountains, and move between and around pieces, but in this case the strength is balanced by the range being somewhat less than the Heavy Horse and Elephant.

Just to make sure I got it, can an Elephant flank with one light horse and two rabbles?

Also, I like that.

[MikeL]

I can’t believe I overlooked the Archer/Xbowman thing. If the piece is called an Xbowman, that’s what it’s going to be called in the game.

As for Dragon not entering fortresses. If you give the defending piece +1, and you put your dragon there, your fortress can’t be taken

Yeah, cause they have both kinds of weapons in the books I just went with the one I thought was more common, but I'm not fussed. My bad with the Dragon in the fortress, good point.

I like that. I’ll implement it soon

Cool.

The Trebuchet might be a bit too powerful with capturing distance 4. I think 3 with jumping over mountains is enough.

Also, making the dragon’s movement method to “speed” is a good change I was thinking about as well, but I was thinking about 4. 7 is too much IMO.

Yeah I went back and forth on increasing the trebuchet from what you had done, so fair enough. With the dragon though I think it should be able to cross about half the board in a single move. I think 4 is too little, but maybe 7 is too much. 5 or 6?

No, I didn’t. I didn’t really like the idea, hence why I excluded it from my own rules set.

Fair enough. Probably makes things too complicated to program for one, but I like the idea of having to defend your fortress from all angles. Part of that idea was to discourage people from putting their fortress on the back line and surrounding it by mountains (which would be impregnable to all but trebuchets. I suppose the promotion rules will do that now (ie you won't surround your fortress by mountains unless you don't think you will need to promote any pieces).

A heavy horse could already capture a spearman. -1 or not, it’s still of the same or a higher tier.

Ok

Just to make sure I got it, can an Elephant flank with one light horse and two rabbles?

Also, I like that.

Yeah exactly.

[LordBiscuit]

Patch notes, if you can call it that:

Promoting a rabble to tier 2 requires that you have less than 7 tier 2 pieces total.

If you have less than 7 tier 3 pieces and a tier 2 piece at the fortress at the end of turn, it gets promoted.

A piece can only be promoted on end of turn and only once (So if you're missing a king, a heavy horse and a light horse, you can't go from rabble to king immediately)

The tier 1 Xbowman was removed. The tier 2 archer's name was changed.

Dragon movement changed to speed 4 with the ability to go over mountains. Trust me, 4 is enough.

Crossbowman can always move over non-mountain pieces

Trebuchet can always move over mountains

Flanking works like that: you take each threatening piece's tier, calculate 2^(tier) and add it to the hex's flanking score. At the end, you take log2(flanking score) of a hex, and if it exceeds or equal to the attacker's tier, the attacker get a +1 flanking bonus. It basically means what MikeL said about flanking.

[MikeL]

Agree with all of it. The only thing I'm worried about is that it seems a bit odd that heavy horses, let alone elephants, can outrun a dragon so I'm still thinking about how to justify that. (edit: I guess heavy horse and elephants are disciplined units while a dragon is a wild thing). The other thing with the heavy horse being a diagonal mover means that a mountain range need not be an obstacle to it if it moves through them on the right angle. I'm wondering if there should be a rule where heavy horse can move between two mountains placed orthogonally to each other, but must stop on the very next space after the mountains (seems a bit of a crap rule though - would need to be play tested).

Did you get my pm? I just realised I've got a spare copy of windows and I can set up parallels on my mac so I should be able to run your game if you send it over or give me a link where I can download it. Thanks.

[MikeL]

Incidentally, someone took the domain name:

http://gameofcyvasse.com/

It's an interesting take on it (I too thought about having different "tiles" like water/forest etc), especially the bit about "ruining" a fortress, but it's too similar to chess to be taken seriously. I like our version better, because it's actually different enough from chess/stratego/blitzkrieg to be a proper game in its own right. Dare I say that I've had the thought that if this takes off we might actually see our variant in the tv series when it gets to that part ;) (but I like to think big).

[LordBiscuit]

I'm wondering if there should be a rule where heavy horse can move between two mountains placed orthogonally to each other, but must stop on the very next space after the mountains (seems a bit of a crap rule though - would need to be play tested).

Either we make a rule that they can't pass, or we let them pass. I'm in favor of letting them pass, it makes defense more interesting

[MikeL]

Either we make a rule that they can't pass, or we let them pass. I'm in favor of letting them pass, it makes defense more interesting

Sounds good. Didn't really like the sound of that rule anyway lol.

Btw I finished the icons I was working on. I see someone else with actual drawing skill had volunteered to help you, but maybe for now these will do? I created them as 300x300 pixel versions then reduced them for this zip file. If you want the higher res versions just let me know.

http://www.mikelepage.com/CyvasseIcons.zip

[MikeL]

Sounds good. Didn't really like the sound of that rule anyway lol.

Btw I finished the icons I was working on. I see someone else with actual drawing skill had volunteered to help you, but maybe for now these will do? I created them as 300x300 pixel versions then reduced them for this zip file. If you want the higher res versions just let me know.

http://www.mikelepag...yvasseIcons.zip

Yeah so it was late last night and I completely forgot to check them against your board. Have modified them so they fit into the spaces on your board, and got rid of the guide ring around each icon. I have updated the above link.

[3_Nugget]

I have been watching you both (Mike and LB) talk for the past few days. Having reviewed the various proposed rule sets and such, I am curious and mildly eager to toss my hat in with you guys. Mike, I am also a .Net developer, and have access privately to a current developer license on the Mac side of things (being the evil mac user I am). I have my own comments on some of the rules (some of the original stuff that Zuberi put in his rules sounds better to me, but I would like to help you do some of the development work, and see how Mike's code looks for this.

I am sure either of you are able to get in touch with me privately or on this forum.

[haydenla]

I discovered this forum yesterday, and am very interested in the rules you have been writing. They are brilliant and I think will make a very fun and strategic game. I wanted to throw my two cents in get your thoughts on some ideas I have:

1) check out www.triplechess.com. The board is a 144 size hexagonal board with 3 "dead spots". If you wanted to play with seaports, you could use those spots as ports. One on your side, one on the opponent's side, and a "neutral" port that either player can use.

2) In regards to the fortress, why not assign your fortress a tier level? If you give it tier 4 plus a bonus according to whatever tier piece is occupying the fort, then the opponent has to work a strategic flanking move or combined attack to capture the fortress (e.g. a tier 2 piece holding a fort would give it a ranking of 6, which would mean that to capture the fort, you would have to plan an attack with a level 3 piece, plus support from two level 2 pieces to capture the fort). But only human pieces can occupy the fort, no pieces other than a dragon can destroy the fort, and a dragon can only destroy a fortress, it cannot occupy.

3) I think that to win, you should have to capture the king and the fortress (a king with an army can still cause damage even if his castle is taken). This rule could add in a couple variant types of game play (e.g. checkmate king with destroyed fort, checkmate king with captured fort). And there could be advantages and disadvantages to each approach. If you capture the opponent's fortress (the most difficult option), you can promote your own pieces at 2 locations and you gain access to their port, but you have to defend the second fortress, as it could be retaken. If you destroy your opponents fortress, they can still use their port, but they can't promote any pieces if their king is captured.

4) I think that the dragon, being the most powerful piece in the game, should have the most movement. If you want the dragon to be limited to 7, or 5 spaces, then your elephants and heavy horse have to be less mobile. What about giving movement patterns to the heavy horse and elephant that are like the Silver and Gold Generals in shogi, and giving them a distance of up to 4 spaces to move in those directions?

Hvy Horse = diagonals + top orthogonal for 4 spaces; Elephant = orthogonals + top diagonals for 4 spaces

Trebuchet/Catapult = 4 spaces any direction + cross mountains

5) Are your "ranged" pieces (e.g. bowmen/trebuchet) able to capture at a distance, or do they have to move to the space to capture a piece?

[MikeL]

I have been watching you both (Mike and LB) talk for the past few days. Having reviewed the various proposed rule sets and such, I am curious and mildly eager to toss my hat in with you guys. Mike, I am also a .Net developer, and have access privately to a current developer license on the Mac side of things (being the evil mac user I am). I have my own comments on some of the rules (some of the original stuff that Zuberi put in his rules sounds better to me, but I would like to help you do some of the development work, and see how Mike's code looks for this.

I am sure either of you are able to get in touch with me privately or on this forum.

Hi 3_Nugget. Good to hear from you. I'm curious what rules you like better in Zuberi's version? To my mind I didn't change it that much from what Zuberi had already said, I just tried to clarify some things that weren't as clear as they could be. Even as our ideas have evolved I think we're still pretty close to the idea of trumps and point values that Zuberi said, just making it a bit easier to remember by talking about tiers and movement. Also, I haven't written a single line of code - this program is Lord Biscuit's baby, and I'm just assisting, so I'll let LB decide if he wants to bring more people in to help with the code/network side of things.

[MikeL]

I discovered this forum yesterday, and am very interested in the rules you have been writing. They are brilliant and I think will make a very fun and strategic game. I wanted to throw my two cents in get your thoughts on some ideas I have:

1) check out www.triplechess.com. The board is a 144 size hexagonal board with 3 "dead spots". If you wanted to play with seaports, you could use those spots as ports. One on your side, one on the opponent's side, and a "neutral" port that either player can use.

Interesting. Thanks for the contribution. I've not heard of triple chess before, but it looks to me that the three dead spots have been designed with 3 players in mind. I'm not sure the board really needs to be that big if it's only 2 players. For the meanwhile I'm happy to put the "seaport" idea to one side, since it adds another level of complication in an already complicated game. Since it isn't strictly necessary to the game, maybe it can be played as a variant once this game takes off.

2) In regards to the fortress, why not assign your fortress a tier level? If you give it tier 4 plus a bonus according to whatever tier piece is occupying the fort, then the opponent has to work a strategic flanking move or combined attack to capture the fortress (e.g. a tier 2 piece holding a fort would give it a ranking of 6, which would mean that to capture the fort, you would have to plan an attack with a level 3 piece, plus support from two level 2 pieces to capture the fort). But only human pieces can occupy the fort, no pieces other than a dragon can destroy the fort, and a dragon can only destroy a fortress, it cannot occupy.

Hmm. I think at this stage we were only assigning tier levels to actual pieces. With the way we've got the flanking rules set up currently, each tier level piece is worth 2 of the tier below, so to defeat a tier 6 "piece in the fortress" you would actually need 8 tier 3 pieces, or 4 tier 4 pieces (i.e. 4 dragons). At the moment the fortress just gives a piece an advantage over pieces of the same tier level.

3) I think that to win, you should have to capture the king and the fortress (a king with an army can still cause damage even if his castle is taken). This rule could add in a couple variant types of game play (e.g. checkmate king with destroyed fort, checkmate king with captured fort). And there could be advantages and disadvantages to each approach. If you capture the opponent's fortress (the most difficult option), you can promote your own pieces at 2 locations and you gain access to their port, but you have to defend the second fortress, as it could be retaken. If you destroy your opponents fortress, they can still use their port, but they can't promote any pieces if their king is captured.

I think programming-wise its better to have a single winning condition. We haven't got any condition where the fortress is actually destroyed (or "ruined" - maybe we should think about that some?) It's true what you said about a king and an army still being dangerous though. If the winning condition was changed to 1) having a live king, 2) occupying the opposing fortress AND 3) defeating the enemy king, it might work, but it would lead to other complications: One stalemate scenario that this winning condition might lead to is where both players have captured the enemy fortress and have a live king, but cannot defeat the other king - would you then be able to use the enemy fortress to promote your pieces? (I think not). I think our current rules are simpler, and justifiable - as some of the characters might say in the books "What good is a King who can't hold his own throne?"

4) I think that the dragon, being the most powerful piece in the game, should have the most movement. If you want the dragon to be limited to 7, or 5 spaces, then your elephants and heavy horse have to be less mobile. What about giving movement patterns to the heavy horse and elephant that are like the Silver and Gold Generals in shogi, and giving them a distance of up to 4 spaces to move in those directions?

Hvy Horse = diagonals + top orthogonal for 4 spaces; Elephant = orthogonals + top diagonals for 4 spaces

Trebuchet/Catapult = 4 spaces any direction + cross mountains

5) Are your "ranged" pieces (e.g. bowmen/trebuchet) able to capture at a distance, or do they have to move to the space to capture a piece?

This is where I think what I was saying about the moves not necessarily being "realistic" comes into play. If the dragon can only be defeated by combinations of pieces or by the opposing dragon, it already has a lot of power separate from how far it can move. In Chess, the only power a queen has is her movement - she can still be captured by a pawn if it comes to that. Here, the dragon's power comes from the tier ranking system: it is very hard to defeat even if it is in enemy territory. Heavy Horse/Elephants can move further, but the dragon can move over mountains and around corners, and it can still pick them off one on one, so adding movement to that would make it pretty much invulnerable. Make sense?

It would be interesting to allow crossbowmen/trebuchet to capture pieces without moving though. What do you think LB?

[LordBiscuit]

MikeL pretty much covered my thoughts, except:

If we let fortresses get ruined, which I'm cool with, we make it so that if you choose to destroy the enemy fortress, you're going for a tie.

Also, ranged pieces not moving on capture - it used to be like that, it went off the window after the very first game.

btw, MikeL, the pieces you sent are all purely black on white. Even if I take the negative for white piece, you can't see your pieces in your fortress

[haydenla]

Makes sense. The descriptions in the book make it seem as though the endgame can happen fairly quickly, which suggests a single goal to win.

[MikeL]

MikeL pretty much covered my thoughts, except:

If we let fortresses get ruined, which I'm cool with, we make it so that if you choose to destroy the enemy fortress, you're going for a tie.

Also, ranged pieces not moving on capture - it used to be like that, it went off the window after the very first game.

btw, MikeL, the pieces you sent are all purely black on white. Even if I take the negative for white piece, you can't see your pieces in your fortress

Is it just the fortress spaces that are the problem? What I tried to do in photoshop is make the png files so they have no background colour. Is it possible to make the fortress look like this? (i.e. colour the border not the space). Also, it would look better if the second colour was red or blue (or basically anything but white) if we're going to have this background colouring scheme.

If you want me to make the "black" pieces a shade of grey, I can do that too, but it's a bit more work to add more detail to the icons themselves.

[LordBiscuit]

It can be done easily. Do you think it's better than coloring the entire hex?

[MikeL]

It can be done easily. Do you think it's better than coloring the entire hex?

Yes. I think as long as it's obvious (my border in the pic was 4 point I think), it's fine, and strategically one of the first things I would do when the "curtain is raised" is see which of my light horse/heavy horses are on that colour, and plan accordingly, so it doesn't hurt to be very obvious which colour the fortress is on.

[MikeL]

Hi LordBiscuit. Finally got a chance to play your program (had to install it on my work computer as my old copy of windows wasn't working for me),

First of all, well done! I can totally see this working. Props to you for actually going and doing it!

Second, I'm looking forward to a version with icons. I was going cross-eyed trying to work out which piece was which, and remember what their movement capabilities were, but it will definitely be worth doing!

Third, you've probably thought of this already, but I'm thinking it needs some kind of visual shorthand to let you know when flanking comes into play, (I took an elephant with a spearman and I had to search to figure out which was the flanking piece). I really like what you've done with clicking on a piece to highlight where it can move. What I was wondering is if, when you click on the piece and one of enemy pieces is highlighted, can you make it so that if there are any flanking pieces that would be required to take that piece, they get highlighted in a different colour?

So say you click on a light horse and it can potentially take two different enemy pieces, both of which require flanking, what you would see is the highlighted borders of the places where your light horse can move, a highlighted border around your pieces that would be required in any flanking play, and probably highlighted spaces between the flanking pieces and each of the target pieces to show how those flanking pieces would move into the target pieces' spot?

Lastly, I'll look into creating a folder on my server for you to ftp into if you want. My service theoretically allows unlimited traffic, but I've never had anything like that kind of load on it. It would be really awesome to put this online. Not so much for online play over the internet, but kinda like this http://oneslime.net/ (which was created by some computer science guys at my uni).

[LordBiscuit]

A screenshot with MikeL's pieces:

Your original images had the wrong size (60x60 while I needed 50x50. I know what I said at the beginning but I changed it to work with a larger board size) and were in the wrong format (I use ARBG bitmaps, but there was no way for you to know that), so the white "noise" comes from the conversion. Anyway, thought you might wanna know how it fits.