Strategic View

[fed1943]

Is there "distortion" in the game?

[Elok]

That analogy doesn't make sense. In context, we would be taking about two different sexual positions, not protected sex vs unprotected sex.

No, you said that taking an idea to a greater extreme necessarily implies something about the original idea. Which is false. And the one statement is basically the other taken to a greater extreme, so the analogy works. If you prefer, try "eat nothing with calories" instead of "eat less than 2500 calories a day."

Honestly, any tile-based system is counter-intuitive and clumsy.

Agreed, more or less, but the squares are less clumsy to my POV because, like MxM, I think in terms of NSEW. And Civ traditionally relies on tiles for all sorts of purposes, so pitching tiles altogether would be a fundamental reworking (grassland terrain produces two food per...?). Perhaps ideally, movement would be liberated from tiles but they would stay for other purposes. So, for example, your horsemen can move fifty miles per turn measured within tiles, and they have the ability to intercept intruders on their tile, or something like that? I'm just throwing out ideas here.

[wodan11]

Why have tiles at all? Just plop units on a map.

[Guynemer]

Thought of that, but that would make city production and terrain improvements rather more dicey.

[Krill]

Because you have to quantify everything in a TBG...

[wodan11]

Starcraft seems to do just fine without a grid overlay, square OR hex.

....speaking of. I may be busy for a while.

[Brael]

Starcraft is real time, not turn based though. You need certain increments you can move if the game is turn based.

[Dinner]

I assume the black splotches on the mini-map are city-states.

They must be.

[Modo44]

In hexes all 6 directions are accurate

Fixed.

[Sir Og]

Starcraft seems to do just fine without a grid overlay, square OR hex.

....speaking of. I may be busy for a while.

I am pretty shure that there is a grid in StarCraft although there is no option to play with the grid visible (and possibly little need to do that)

Tiles are essential in civ as we know it however because cites occupy tiles, resources occupy tiles, cities can work a certein number of tiles, borders form along tiles, etc. So there needs to be sqares or hexes or some other uniform tiling for all these things to work.

And since spheres cannot be uniformely tiled we will probably never see a true sphereical map in Civ. (not that this is very important)

I also find squares to be somewhat aestheticaly more pleasing than hexes. With hexes everything seems to be too round.

[Dinner]

Why doesn't 2k post on our board?

I sent Greg an PM asking him just that question.

[wodan11]

Tiles are essential in civ as we know it however because cites occupy tiles, resources occupy tiles, cities can work a certein number of tiles, borders form along tiles, etc. So there needs to be sqares or hexes or some other uniform tiling for all these things to work.

It is, therefore it must be? Come on.

[Sir Og]

I have actually thought about that. And I could not come up with a better system to represent these things.
How can you represent resources and link them with the world map without being able to clearly define and separate them. Give an example of doing that without the help of some sort of a grid.

[Modo44]

It is, therefore it must be? Come on.

The "must" comes from the computer architecture, so it's not circular. A PC isn't designed to handle non-discrete math. You can make the hexes small enough to map them to screen pixels or close to that (it's already being done for terrain graphics in some games), but you can't completely remove the underlying grid.

[wodan11]

The "must" comes from the computer architecture, so it's not circular. A PC isn't designed to handle non-discrete math. You can make the hexes small enough to map them to screen pixels or close to that (it's already being done for terrain graphics in some games), but you can't completely remove the underlying grid.

That is somewhat gratuitous logic.

Decreasing grid size to approach or equal pixel (or memory location) size is effectively removing the underlying grid from the human's perspective.