Thanks, Mr. Smith, for some comments that are actually germane to this game. (The comment section for the original version of Scirocco somehow turned into a discussion on the perfectibility of chess variants in general, not something I had in mind when I created a very specific game.)

I'm disinclined to remove the Dervish, since it's one of the pieces that gives this game its particular flavor. It's not a weak piece, considering the company it keeps; it's stronger than a majority of the unpromoted pieces in the game. I have given some thought to making it stronger, though, allowing to relay Firzan power as well as Alfil and Dabbaba, still with the constraint that the destination must be adjacent to the Dervish. I think I'll try this as an experiment, although it might make the Dervish too strong -- I don't want to turn it from *an* important piece into *the* important piece, since that role is intended for the Scirocchi.

The Harpy, on the other hand, I've long felt a little uneasy about. It plays reasonably well in Typhoon, where you are more likely to get one while you have plenty of weak pieces on the board that can benefit from a Knight relay, but in Scirocco, where there are fewer pieces to start with, that happens less often. I'm thinking of redefining it (in both games) in a way that is a compromise between its current power and your suggestion for the Dabbaba promotion: namely, that it moves as a Queen and relays Knight power along Queen lines. Again, I'll try this as an experiment, but reserve the right not to adopt the change if I don't like the results.

As for the starting array, I'm not terribly attached to the current one. My initial idea was to do what I did in Typhoon: that is, to allow you to swap any piece with the one on the same rank that is the same distance from the vertical midline of the board, provided that the overall result had either mirror symmetry or rotational symmetry. However, I decided that people would find it too troublesome to make this adjustment, which (mostly) has a pretty minor effect on gameplay. I settled on the current array, which is serviceable, pretty arbitrarily. Do you think anyone would actually go the trouble of choosing a piece arrangement at the start of each game, or (in Zillions, anyway) accept a randomly chosen arrangement?

The Stork, Goat, and Guard, as well as the current promotions of Alfil and Dabbaba, I'm pretty attached to. They are admittedly a bit quirky and asymmetrical, but after a decade I think I've had enough time to consider them fairly carefully, and they make for a pretty game in practice, if not in theory.