These replies are not nearly committal enough, please form religious cults around your opinions on this matter.
Personally I am strictly on the side of mandatory full minion lines.
First off full minion lines delay aggression by a few turns guaranteed, this is good because it prevents cases where one side can immediately begin attacking/exerting pressure, which can be a huge advantage or even immediately game winning. We can see this from rush setups in CEO, making use of ghost to immediately point 4 pieces at one corner (if your king is in that corner good luck). The same thing exists in Favour Chess, with elitism you can point 2 rooks/giraffe/bishop at one corner turn one.
F3 has often said that my position on mandatory minions reduces the options a player has when army building, but needing to be prepared against these rushes seems far more restrictive. (also as a designer you have to be very careful to not create pieces which strengthen rushes)
The other reason I want full minion lines is just because being blocked by your own pieces is good, from an interesting-ness perspective. You have to make decisions about how to unblock your pieces and develop, and you can make plays to stop your opponent's minions from moving, which blocks the pieces behind them.
You can imagine that a game where every piece can get to wherever it wants immediately is missing something.
Here is a piece I'm currently trying to get changed, totally unrelated:
just think of 'blank' as an actual unit - and that is how many options you remove.
make 2 minions in place of blank and you actually have more options, other than the rush.
also unless I missed it, something not mentioned here so far is the idea that having a 3rd row and blank minion slots starts to deviate away from the 'chess vibes' which are important for exclaiming the game's prestige. Sure there are 10,000+ chess variants that change the 16 unit army, but usually they look silly 'at a glance', and that connotation drags across the entire span of someone's interaction with the variant even beyond the point they decide it's good, because there will always be the specter lurking behind them saying "ok but this isn't reeaal chess", and the more arbitrary deviations there are the stronger that specter grows.
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after this post i got ryan to ragequit a session by using bishop rook rush
totstally worth it
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