I've conducted some experiments over the past few days with a stronger Dervish and Harpy.

The Dervish I proposed (relays Firzan power to orthogonally adjacent pieces, as well as Dabbaba plus Alfil, provided the target piece lands next to the Dervish) seems to work well. The Dervish, already important for assisting in the development of the Pawns and weak pieces, now performs this role even better. It's more like itself, I'd say.

On the other hand, The Mad Harpy, which relayed Knight moves along Queen lines instead of Knight lines, was a little too powerful. I was looking for a piece worth about a Queen, but even with the relatively low piece density usually prevailing at the point in the game when you can promote a Dervish to a Harpy, the Mad Harpy side won easily in most of the test games I tried.

I also tried shorter-range versions of the Mad Harpy. The one that moved and relayed as Q2 was a little too weak, but the Q3 version seemed about the right strength, so that's the one I'll adopt.

I haven't experimented with alternative starting arrays yet, but I expect I'll do that soon.

Regarding Mr. Smith's Ninja and Lion, they're fine pieces and I'm sure someone has used them elsewhere to good effect. However, I don't want to add new pieces to a board that is already full enough (an initial piece density of 54%), and I don't want to displace the Dervish, which has a particular role to play in this game. Scirocco is full of slow-moving pieces, and video-game-addled 21st-century types are unlikely to have the patience to play through an opening of this game unless there's some way to expedite it. By improving the mobility of the weakest pieces, the Dervish helps those pieces reach the front lines before (I hope) the snooze factor sets in.

Mr. Smith's Chain sounds like an extremely strong piece, but one that lacks clarity. The Harpy is already a bit of a challenge to keep track of: when you have one, any of your pieces may become able to move as a Knight, which scrambles any ideas you may have formed about your position before getting the Harpy. Still, it's not so bad: the new Harpy's range is limited, and we're used to dealing with Knights. However, a piece that potentially lets any of your pieces move like any other would be very confusing, at least for a poor player like me.

Despite the large size of the board and the novel pieces, Scirocco really is meant to be a rather clear, playable game, not an exercise in complexity and confusion. (Admittedly, my idea of what constitutes playable may be affected by the years I've spent playing computer strategy games, where a game with 1000 pieces on the board that takes ten hours is considered a miniature.)

I don't think Mr. Smith's Flip would be a very exciting addition to this game, because only a few pieces have different capturing and non-capturing moves, so it wouldn't have much effect.

Mr. Solé's suggestion about the Pawns is one I adopted, but in Typhoon rather than this game. The asymmetry between the number of Pawns each player has and the number of other pieces has been around since Shatranj, and I didn't want to make such a sharp break with game aesthetics that have been established for a millennium and a half.