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Comment by clolege | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is one of the reasons why I find it more dull than chess.

There is an incentive to just not move your pieces, so that the other player thinks they're bombs. As a result, players only activate 2-3 pieces at a time.

In chess, on the other hand, you are constantly moving your pawns to the other side to promotion, or otherwise trying to activate/coordinate all of your pieces for an attack.

It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego was trained to not lose instead of win, then the top strategy might be shuffling pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would ever have the patience to play that way though.

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> It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego was trained to not lose instead of win, then the top strategy might be shuffling pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would ever have the patience to play that way though.

Tournament Stratego uses a clock, which reduces some of the issue there. It's not hard to beat a player that does what you suggest; just send some middling pieces after each piece that moves. You'll take the weak pieces and reveal the strong pieces.

It is much more defensive than chess in general though, as moving a piece and capturing with a piece both give the other player information.

> It's not hard to beat a player that does what you suggest; just send some middling pieces after each piece that moves. You'll take the weak pieces and reveal the strong pieces.

But taking a strong piece means revealing a stronger piece of you own. That’s why I think the best strategy is to put almost all your weak pieces up front.,and wait for your enemy to reveal their pieces. Scouts, especially, are canon fodder that you sacrifice to find out information about the enemy and that you need to get rid of so that you get room to maneuver.

Having scouts in the mid/late game is important to make them play more cautiously with their spy, since a scout can take out a spy from any straight-line path.

If you know know where the enemy’s spy is he either is dead or served his purpose by killing your marshall.

So, the idea is to, in midgame, make educated guesses as to the positions of the spy (e.g. the piece that stays close to the enemy general, or that moves towards your marshall), and sacrifice scouts, hoping to kill the spy?

Interesting tactic (and if that’s their common usage, why are they called scouts? ‘Assassin’ might be a better name)

That is one of several uses for scouts. When the opponent has scouts, it's safer to keep your spy behind one of the lakes, since they will occasionally fly across the map just to reveal a piece; you don't want your spy getting "accidentally" killed by a scout either. If the opponent sacrifices all of their scouts early you can move the spy around more easily.

Since killing the opponents Marshall with the spy is such a huge advantage, losing your spy is a big disadvantage.

> When the opponent has scouts, it's safer to keep your spy behind one of the lakes

I don’t know anybody who plays the game that way, but reading the rules (https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/Stratego.PDF), that wouldn’t fully help. The rules say

“scouts are the only pieces allowed to both move and attack in the same turn. A scout can move any number of open squares forward, backward or sideways into an attack position. Once in position, it can then attack”

That doesn’t say in any way that that attack has to be in the direction of movement. So, you could move a scout 3 squares forward and then attack leftwards.

Different editions of Stratego have different wordings for scouts. Some rules are silent on moving and attacking in the same turn (implying that scouts can't move & attack in the same turn), some rules specifically state that the scout cannot move and attack in the same turn. Some rules say they can move and attack in a straight line, and some use the wording you quote.

The ISF rule is that the attack must be in-line with the move[1].

1: https://isfstratego.kleier.net/docs/rulreg/isfgamerules.pdf Section 5.3

Chess has the 50 moves rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-move_rule about

A "player can claim a draw if no capture has been made and no pawn has been moved in the last fifty moves"

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