General comments

On the whole, Arimaa becomes very intuitive. My current way of playing is search depth 1 turn: what am i going to do this turn? At the most i check if i could have blundered away any pieces. In chess, it is possible to calculate a few moves ahead because of forced moves, and there are no major changes to the board each move. In fact, i think i am playing Arimaa quite reasonably is because i trained myself in blitz on FICS -- don't think, just move what you think is good. Normally if i see a bishop for pawn exchange that may crack the enemy's castled position i would just whack, partially since the opponent is human and that may provoke a psychological awakening. Using the shock element for me in chess is best when the guy has pawnstormed me and i just park my king in the corner behind his pawn. Then he would be wasting time thinking of how to crack my "hostage shield", and i can attack elsewhere.
Now, back to the point.
I find Arimaa a lot more simulative of war than chess in terms of strategy and positioning. It presents a problem of how to allocate resources better and organise units effectively. Blockades, hostages, advancement, breaks, combined attacks, siege defence, etc are all applicable for war, instead of pins, skewers, forks, point-pressure and open threats in chess.
Programmes now play Arimaa very predictably, and that is where they fail. Humans can learn and adapt their style to counter the bots. For example, i realised that bot_Aamira liked to steamroller (my original plan when i first learnt Arimaa). So i tried to disrupt the formation in the opening by attacking with my lone elephant, trying to force the bot's camel and elephant to the same side and sticking them there. In the midgame the bot would put much pressure on my home traps, so usually, if i don't blunder, i would defend until i find a hole in the flank to push through a rabbit.
Perhaps because of this, bot_Bomb has always owned the computer championships even though it was hardly modified after 2005 (maybe Fotland lost interest). Its style is more varied, and actually offered an elephant sacrifice/ blockade to beat naveed in this year's challenge match.