ChessMate v1.2.0  Patch Notes

Smarter opponents

The chess AI thinks longer at higher difficulties — Hard, Expert, and Grandmaster all play noticeably stronger than before. The opening book has been expanded from a handful of lines to over 50, covering most popular openings (Italian, Spanish, Sicilian, French, Caro-Kann, King's Indian, Queen's Gambit, English, Réti, and more), so the bots now follow real theory in the opening instead of wandering off.

New rating scale

Ratings have been redesigned around a Raider.IO style scale where 3500 is the top tier (Grandmaster). The 6 AI difficulties are now:

Everyone starts at 1,500. Existing rated players will have their multiplayer ratings rescaled automatically the first time they log in.

Singleplayer now affects your rating

Beating (or losing to) the AI now moves your Singleplayer rating, separate from your Multiplayer rating. Your two ratings live side-by-side and never bleed into each other:

• MP rating - competitive, shown on the leaderboard, earned vs other players.
• SP rating - private, never shared, earned vs the AI characters.

The Settings → "Reset Rating" button only resets your SP rating.

Cross-version protection

ChessMate v1.2.0 cannot match against older ChessMate versions. If someone nearby is on an out-of-date version and tries to queue, you'll see a one-time chat warning to nudge them to update. This prevents weird rating mismatches across the version transition.

Quality of life

• Higher matchmaking range so finding a multiplayer game on the new wider scale stays quick (±400 initially, expanding +200 every 30 seconds).
• The game window's portrait icon now matches the minimap button.

Performance

The Hard / Expert / Grandmaster bots have had their thinking budgets capped to keep CPU usage manageable on low-end machines. The AI has less move depth because of this.