Map Mode

[KrazyHorse]

What do you think guys? Civ I was horizontal&verical squares, Civ II was diagonal squares, many games use hexagonal tiles since this is the only isometric tiling of the plane.

[Ecthy]

Hexagonal is quite he way to go.. I've been convinced by that map mode since I've played Age of Wonders. of course, you can only walk "straight" into six directions:

up (north)
up-right (northeast)
down-righ (southeast)t
down (south)
down-left (southwest)
up-left (northwest)

that means there's no way to g ostraight into West or East, which demands some nice feature, like another movement points system... by that, you could "jump" over certain borders, using more movement points than by just going straight...

going northeast might cost 2 points, so does going southeast afterwards... 1 tile east - 4 points
if you go east straight, directly - 3 points

does this make sense?

[KrazyHorse]

well, it doesn't make much sense if you stick to thinking in the original 4-cardinal-points system, but it does mean that it costs the same amount of movement points to go between any 2 equally-spaced tiles on the map, no matter what their relative orientation

[SerapisIV]

What is the anaronym next to something else, JDGAD, mean?

[Ecthy]

yeah, what does that mean? now that I really care, I have chosen my pick, I'd like to know however

[KrazyHorse]

Just Don't Give A Damn

[007]

actually coming back to the map.
I think the map should not be flat. It must be a globe.
So instead of paning the map u'd rotate sphere. Somethin similar was done loooooong ago in X-force series.
So u'd see squears getting smaler close to horison and fool scale in the migle of the screen.

ALSO, I'd like to see smooth zoom in on a batalfield instead of just changing the screen. Besides I don't want to see citywals to be a beckground picture, i want them to be visualized as a real obstical.

[Inverse Icarus]

screen shottys show a isometric, civII view.

i like it better anyway.

[Captain]

Global solution?

Hmm, I like the concept of a globe, but I don't know how to deal with the poles. Ideally, there should be fewer tiles there, but that would result in an ugly and non-intuitive map.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deal with poles?

which of the square tiles, diagonal tiles, or hex tiles would be the best solution for this? or is a totally new/different type of map required?

(I think civ 3 is going with the diagonal tiles no matter what the poll results are, changing the basic tiling changes gameplay considerably and they'd have to rebalance everything)

[007]

if u think of a geosphere, it is made up out of equal triangular faces.
A triangulat tile is not that convenient, so (i guess) the next step is hexagon.

[Rollo_CH]

Would be nice to see hexagons, for instance the borders would be nicer...now they look like square boxes, like most of the United States, and some of the African countries, made from the Generals at the drawing tables.

[Geoff the Medio]

The "largest" possible platonic solid is the icosahedron. It has 20 sides, all of which are triangles. It is not physically possible to construct a "sphere-like polyhedron" with all equal sides, on which all the sides of the sides are equal in length any more complex than this.

Think of a soccerball (or non-american football ball if you prefer). It has both hexagons and pentagons on it... because it's not possible to construct a sphere-shape with all uniform "tiles" with that many "tiles"

This means that any attempt to implimenet a spherical globe in a civ-like game would have serious problems. It would only be possible to have a spherical model of the gameworld with all same-shaped tiles, of size greater than 20 tiles total, if the tiles are not all the same size. (again, this assume the tiles are simple shapes... eg. equilateral triangles, regular hexagons or squares)

[Provost Harrison]

Forget the idea of a globe, that would be complicated and confusing. Now civ games have always used quadrilateral tiles. I think the principle of the hexagonal square would be better, personally, as I have seen it used to good effect in other games (PG for example) and would even out movement between squares a bit. I personally think it would be a good move, at least to test...

[KrazyHorse]

Geoff makes a good point; he's obviously had as many math classes as I have. The problems with a globe really do come down to the fact that the only regular solids are tetrahedrons,octahedrons, cubes, dodecahedrons and icosahedrons. Of all these, icosahedrons have the most faces at 20, but these sides are triangles...not very convenient, and not isometric (even less so than the misnamed civII system). Dodecahedrons are smaller (12 faces) but are closer to isometric, with pentagons for sides. All of this goes to show that a civII size map in full 3-D is not possible.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was the fact that a city surrounded by 2 rows of hexagons would have a total of 19 resource tiles, not too far off from the current (and misshapen) 21-square city radius.

[007]

I got it figured out

You all are right, that straight with plaotonic solids we can't solve the problem.

However, take Octahedron for example:
Break each triangolar face into triangular mach that follows contur of sphere.
(I'm a grahpic designer - work a litle with 3d-VIZ)
So, "3D viz" can do a sphere composed of triangular faces, based on tetrahidron, octahidron and icosahidron.

The next step is to combine 6 triangular faces into 1 tile, Wich creates hexogonal map with 6 rectangular poles (norrth, south and 4 poles on equator).

Actualy drawing out all possible solutions brought me an indea:

Fuge the tiles at ALL. Measure city growth in acres and speed of units in miles per turn.
for example 1 worker can work 10 000 acers around city. A warrior can move 100 miles per turn .
It can't get more real than that!


But, Unfortunately Firaxis already has it's graphic engine runing and they won't change it to hexogonal model.
So the thing i'd like to see is atleast spherical distortion of the screen just to feel the glob.