Breakthrough

Okay, this is part of my work for the cs3243 assignment, although I have setup-ed and compiled the given stub files, tbh I have yet to really study the question and think about what to do (aka doing the work), but so far I've spent some time playing the zog implementation and discovered some interesting things. The pieces behave like the pawns from chess....but it isn't really chess due to the different movement rules. As an avid chess player myself, I had no understanding of the defensive methods needed for this whole new 'board' game and lost most of the initial games without knowing what was really happening.

Now, pawn play in chess is a very involved subject that can span several books, books on chess I mean. There are two ways to look at pawns: as individual entities, or their collective structure. Mobility and structural integrity, dynamic and static considerations. There is also an element of central control in chess which is also relevant to breakthrough, but in a different way. Just like defence, the idea of central control is a little different in breakthrough; making 'central' moves do not necessarily result in actual control if structural integrity is not maintained.

Defence/Blocking:
Due to the rules of the game, the first player that sends a unit across the board, would be the winner. If there is such a thing as absolute blocking, the victory condition would be impossible to achieve, so defence is mostly just about blocking and delaying the opponent (since no blockade can be held indefinitely due to zugzwang, yet another important theme in chess). It takes at least two units to block a single unit, and there are several configurations.

Offence/Breakthrough/Combinations:
-more on this later-