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Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Oct 11, 2020 03:52 AM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from 03:00 AM:I'd add another inhibition I have is that I've seen very few examples on this website of the FIDE army plus pair(s) of pieces added to them, where the pair(s) were not strikingly divergent in some way from other piece type(s) used in the chosen armies. Indeed, Wide Chess and Royal Court are more or less the only counter-examples I've noticed.
How about Janus Chess and New Chancellor Chess?
That's where perception may come in. Archbishops or Chancellors at least have a long-range component (besides their knight component). Centaurs are purely short-range leapers, that have a knight component. That's how I see things at the moment, anyway.
P.S.: I'd note once again, that at least Centaurs are not minor pieces (like knights) though - one can deliver mate with just the aid of its King, vs. a lone King.
P.P.S.: So, a better example might be the WD and NWD piece types (as used in CV[s] invented by Joe Joyce, even though the rest of the armies in these do not include all FIDE pieces). Both have mating potential by themselves with the aid of their king, and both are short-range leapers with a WD component. Still, one might quibble that a NWD is a major piece and a WD is not, but that doesn't seem a striking enough difference, to me anyway (at least at the moment); others might argue that at least a NWD is a clearly superior version of a WD.
[edit: A possible counter-example to my ways of thinking about similarity of piece types is that archbishops and chancellors would need to be considered similar, and yet games featuring at least one of each are quite popular (e.g. Capablanca Chess); one CV that exists is EuChess by Carlos Cetina, in which there are in fact two pairs of archbishops and chancellors, besides the FIDE armies, per side(!)]
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I once had a CV of my invention (Wide Chess) gently criticized for my adding to the standard chess army of each side (on a 12x8 board) 4 pawns, plus two pairs of leapers that were somewhat similar to each other, in that they both had an alfil movement as part of their powers. Namely, it was thought said leapers weren't divergent enough from each other.
In the case of (10x8) Royal Court, a pair of leapers plus 2 pawns is added to the army of each side. The leapers have the same movement powers as knights, plus they can also move like a man (often called the Centaur compound). So, I can see how this addition of leapers to the standard chess army might be gently criticized, too (at least they are very powerful leapers, which might relieve any perception of slight redundancy).
Recently I had a couple of ideas of my own about adding pair(s) of fairly knight-like minor pieces to the FIDE army, although I may have rejected these ideas too quickly, partly due to the previous critique (of my Wide Chess). Namely the ideas involved adding either a pair of fibnifs and/or a pair of horse(mao)-wazir compound pieces (depending on the board size I would use). Besides Wide Chess not yet proving popular on Game Courier, I'd add another inhibition I have is that I've seen very few examples on this website of the FIDE army plus pair(s) of pieces added to them, where the pair(s) were not strikingly divergent in some way from other piece type(s) used in the chosen armies. Indeed, Wide Chess and Royal Court are more or less the only counter-examples I've noticed.
https://www.chessvariants.com/piececlopedia.dir/fibnif.html
https://www.chessvariants.com/piececlopedia.dir/mao.html