Chess Miniatures Game

Hey everyone!

For the last year or more, I've been working on a Chess Miniature's game that I was hoping I could get some feed back on. Basically, its played exactly like Chess, except that each player brings an "army" to the table. I've created 21 new pieces, some pawn swaps, some knight/bishop swaps, some rook swaps, and some queen swaps. They all move or interact in different ways from their parent pieces.

For the time being, since I've just been doing playtesting on a super small basis, each piece is denoted by a different letter of the alphabet (with the King being a star). I've done this simply because it was really easy to convert a cheap Othello set into a ton of pieces for this game by just using letters to represent the different pieces.

The thing is, I'm not a super amazing Chess player. So I was hoping to get some feedback on the pieces. The pieces are totally compatible with normal Chess pieces, and would be played on the same board (working on some 4 player chess testing with these pieces at the moment). You can see the complete list of pieces and rules for now here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApUge-xbUlSOdHZwRXVYUlJ2blJ...

We've been playing the game where each player presents his or her army at the beginning of the game, an 8-sided die is rolled, and white places their king on the corresponding square when counting from left to right, and then black does the same. Then, starting with White, each player places their pieces on the board in the following order: W-B-B-W-W-B-B... until each player has places all of their pieces. Pawns must still be played on the pawn row, and all other pieces are placed on the back row.

Castling is done per the rules for Chess960 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960)

I've been working on making molds for the new pieces, and was planning on eventually just custom making sets in whatever color. Not really for profit or anything, just for the fun of it. I've always liked point based war games, but prefer more abstract strategy. And I've always thought it would be fun to have more kinds of chess pieces, and be able to build a "deck" of chess pieces like a collectible card game.

The kinds of things I'm looking for, feedback wise, are:
1.) Aside from the pawn, do any of the new pieces appear to perform strictly better than traditional chess pieces? As an example: If you'd never want to use a Knight, because the Spy is better in every way.
2.) Are some of the more "out there" pieces (like Jester, Xenophobe, Yeoman, Herald, Usurper, Neophyte) just untenable, or are the niches that they excel in good for more advanced players. Specifically, if you're familiar with MaRos design articles, these are things I'm thinking of as "Johnny" pieces.
3.) Promotion rules. For right now, when a piece is promoted, it can only be promoted to another piece you have in your army (though can create a second version of one, like giving you a second Valkyrie for example). We've bandied about the idea that you could have a "reserve" set of pieces that you could promote into (or are forced to unless a piece is taken). This "reserve" could also serve as a sideboard of sorts - and could mean you take extra pieces into the game with you that you could use to select pieces on deployment, OR this could be a set of pieces kept secret from your opponent so that there is a surprise factor in the promotion (Certain pieces exist almost for the sole purpose of being promoted into better pieces). At which implementation step do you think that the game would get too complicated and unpredictable? Which would you most like to play with?
4.) Pawn obsolescence. While the standard pawn is not truly obsolete in this version of chess, the other versions of the piece, generally, have more versatility and use. I've tried my best to balance them out, and each of the pawns at least FEELS very different in execution, but the pawn (while usable) falls a little flat in terms of gameplay. In another way of stating it: I sometimes still field Knights when I play because their game play is still something I want on a particular set-up. I never field pawns for fun, only for testing. Is this OK? Is my lack of skill just underestimating the power of the Pawn as is?
5.) Army makeup. Right now, we've just been testing the game in standard chess set-ups. Basically, Pawns are worth a point, and any 1 point piece can replace a pawn; Knights and Bishops are interchangeable with any 3 point piece, Rooks with 5, and Queens with 9. With a King counting as 3 points, this gives you basically 42 points worth of pieces. It would be possible to change this to - you must field a king, and 39 other points of pieces, but leave the number and distribution of those pieces up to an individual player. So if you wanted to field 4 queens and a Knight with your king, then you could. Would this be more appealing?

Anyway that's a ton of information, sorry! But I'd be super glad to hear from anyone what they think. I'm working on a PDF file that would basically detail out the rules for each individual piece onto a card (for ease of play testing) and building a set to play with is relatively easy - I found a ton of Othello boards at target for less than 5$ on sale once and picked a ton up, but they are mostly easy to find at a garage sale, and you could use stickers and checkers just as easily.

Thanks!