Horizontal vs diagonal tiles --- vs hexagonal tiles.

Sorry to bring up a very old arguement that has been hashed and thrashed to death since the first PC game came out, but while watching a DVD of Babylon 5, I think there is a way to "fix" space displays to solve the basic complaint of the horizontal vs diagonal tiles - the unproportional time it takes to get from one "corner" of a galacy to any of the other three corners.

In the B5 "war room" they had a flat representation of the galacy marked off in hexagonal tiles. If PC space games used hexagonal tiles instead of square or diamond shaped tiles a ship would have more tiles to traverse to get from a corner to a diagonal corner than it would to get to either of the other two adjacent corners, giving the game a more "realistic" feel.

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The hexagonal tile set is seen more in the pure military stradegy game, several 'table top' games use it. A game such as this 1 has many stradegies, such as cultural and technology, and thus the need for a purest tile set is not missed that much. I'm sure the designers thought it over and keep the square set for various reasons, and personally I don't think much would be gained by them going to the hexagonal set.

The only other thing I have to add is that it is too late for them to change, considering how little the benefit would be. They would have to rework movement and AI stradegy with the introduction of a new tile set, so it's not going to happen now.

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Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

The only other thing I have to add is that it is too late for them to change

True, but I would be willing to bet that GC2 isn't the last version we see.

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I like them personally, but the argument is that they are harder to do and if you give diagonals a greater move penalty, it doesn't really matter. Plus with squares you have 8 directions as opposed to 6. But I don't know whether galciv has a greater move penalty for diagonals.

I am betting though, that there is no way we are going to see hexes in GalCiv 2.

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Hexes are a pain, from a programmer's point of view. You can do them, but they take actual work to do. A simple grid, on the other hand, is nothing but a 2 dimensional array. That's something that the computer does easily, with no significant work on the programmer's part.

I don't think hexes matter significantly to a game like GC2. If SD ever goes to hexes, I'll be happy with them. But if they don't, it won't stop me from having fun and enjoying the GC line.

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