I think most discussions regarding evaluation talks about material, mobility, PSTs, but what evaluation terms gave you a good boost in elo but is rarely talked about?
For me, it was detecting the distance of the kings from a passed pawn. A passed pawn would be penalized the closer it is to the enemy king, and given a bonus when it is farther. The same would be done for the friendly king, but in reverse. The rank of the passed pawn and the game phase is also taken into account.
This gave my engine around +25 elo. I have been working on my engine for months now and it is about ~2650 elo CCRL (based on my testing) and I was used to getting 5-10 elo increases so this was big for me. It was also especially surprising because my PSTs are king-position aware so I thought this would have very little effect, if any.
What other underrated eval terms do you have?
Underrated eval terms? (HCE)
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rtarga
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- Full name: Renz Targa