Hexagon Tiles: Like them, love them, or RAGGGEEEE!!!
- Thread starter Jakerg23
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South Island, New Zealand
That would be a completely awesome tile set
This is why I'm happy about the move to hexes. Assuming they really do make the world round it will mean a Civ on the edges of the map wont get the benefit of a 'safe' border, unlike a Civ on the equator who has to watch every direction.
Sure it may take some tech or air power (subs under the north pole?) to use this but I think its a great idea.
Sorry, that geometry doesn't work. You can't make a "sphere" out of uniformly sized hexagons any more than you can make one out of uniformly sized squares. To make a sphere you need to mix hexagons and pentagons-- like a soccer ball-- though i'm uncertain if there are limitations on the size.
EDIT: I see other people have been pointing this out.
To elaborate, the only way you get close to a sphere with either hexes or squares is by shrinking the tile as it gets closer to the pole. You can see this happening on the CiV IV map if you pay attention. If the tiles went all the way to the pole they would end up being infinitely small. If you are going to make tiles partway toward the poles as in Civ IV then the question is how much smaller are you willing to make the tiles at the N/S extreme than on the equator? It doesn't matter if you use squares or hexes.
Anyway, i'm all for the move to hexagons. I've played FreeCiv which allows hex maps and prefer it that way. Not only does it remove the weirdness that diagonals occasionally create, but maps look more organic build out of hexes.
The arguments that squares are somehow enable superior gameplay is amusing. Hexes have been standard in serious or semi-serious wargames for decades.
Yeah Wesnoth is a great example of a hex based game, though it's not very much like CiV. But it's free and turn-based and strategic, and might be a good way for some people unused to hexes to work out their uncertainties about this type of grid.
Full Discloser: I used to be a Wesnoth Dev.
SammyKhalifa
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Hi,
I haven't posted in a long, long time.
But I made my way back here the other day, and noticed this conversation. I understand the reasoning for hexes, but I still prefer squares. I like to go in the cardinal directions. Can you imagine if RL urban planners mapped out cities using hexagons? No right-angled intersections.
Trias
Donkey with three behinds
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Well, IMHO, all urban planners that map out cities in square grids need to be shot. Use some imagination for christ sake.
r_rolo1
King of myself
In case you don't know, the preference by square grids in city planning is a major contributor for traffic clogging in cities
And to be honest, no right angles intersections means less acidents as well 
Minor Annoyance
Deity
Reminds me of a argument about Master of Orion 3 having real time battles. One person that didn't like real time said that turn based was more realistic. There were many gameplay arguments to make in favour of turn based, but they chose realism, a bad argument for many reasons, most obvious being that "real time" has the word "real" in it.
Most old cities don't have "square based" roads. Also, civ is a bigger scale, so we'd be dealing with inter city roads which aren't often in right angles.
It would be interesting to see how a city would be designed if there was no inherent bias to having square blocks, but I think that's too ingrained in our thoughts to get past, as some in this topic have shown. I'm not sure no right angle intersections would necessarily lessen accidents though. Imagine having intersections of not two but three roads! Actually there's one of those right near my house, and it's fine, but most of them are one way streets, and the street I'm on, the north and south aren't even connected going by car.In case you don't know, the preference by square grids in city planning is a major contributor for traffic clogging in cities
The pedestrian street signals take forever though, because of the small window when the right roads are not moving.
Square, right angle city planning was a huge advance over the unplanned road-going in any direction status-quo for most of the world for most of history. A grid also a lot better for finding your way around, especially when the streets have an orderly naming system. I lived in a southern city for over a decade that built on the random cow-path system, and it was maddening to try to learn how to get around.
Washington DC is a good example of a city that was designed with a lot of imagination, various diagonals and loops etc. The map is pretty, but that's not what city planning is for. It's a real pain to try to navigate DC.
The grid pattern has some faults in the automobile age, but it ruled before that, and still has significant advantages.
I think this argument ended a while ago so I apologise for my lateness but I wanted to give a brief explanation about this matter from my point of view:
The thing is, in the Civ4 square based system the 8 directions are equal in some ways and not equal in others. Calling them simply EQUAL is wrong becuase of many reasons, even though you do correctly name some of the ways in which they do have equal properties.
In (Euclidean) geometry the shortest distance between two points is always the length of a straight line connecting them, right?
On a hex grid, whenever a unit heads in a straight line in any direction he/she is always taking a unique shortest path. On a square based grid with diagonal moves permitted, only straight paths on the diagonal directions are unique shortest paths.
Indeed, in the N,S,E and W directions, as the distance between two points becomes larger, the number of possible paths between the two grows rather quickly (someone eager to do maths might like to figure out what rate the number of paths grows based on distance, assuming for simplicity sake there are no obstacles on the grid). So if you want to circumnavigate the globe by heading east, you know that taking a path that explores more (i.e. by moving diagonally) yet still reaches the same end point is a better idea than heading due east, even though they both take the same number of moves.
So while hexes is by no means a perfect system when you compare it to squares, it does have the advantage that shortest paths have the same properties in every direction a unit can move so there is no obvious best way to move. In square systems, moving diagonally a lot of the time has advantages that other posters have already done well to describe.
In civ5, assuming they stick with the current orientation of hexes where you can go due east or west in straight lines, then circumnavigating the globe (even though I really don't like that bonus in Civ4 and think it should be removed) is going to require you to take a much straighter path than before if you still want to do it quickly.
One important distinction that can be made about the two systems (hex vs. square) is that in a hex system, the shortest path between two points always requires you head at each step in only one of two possible directions (sometimes only one possible direction). The square system has the odd property that for some paths you can head in three possible directions at each step.
Now this might be an odd time to bring this up, but another consequence of moving to hex based system means use of the numberpad on the keyboard for movement is going to be much less obvious than it was before. I guess one would just eliminate the 2 and 8 as movement keys? Or, if units all do have 2 movement points minimum, 2 and 8 could be allowed (south and north) but they would use up 2 move points. This might be a bit weird to show on the interface...
Sorry for double posting but this I think required a separate post as it is a different issue...
One of the problems (IMO) that plagued Civ4 and its earlier incarnations was that the designers always had to go with two distinct "metrics" (ways of measuring distances between points). One of the metrics, which dictated how far units could move, basically gave square shapes for equal distances a unit could move. In other words, and this may sound awkward to those people not geometrically inclined, circles were square shaped for that metric. (The definition of a circle being all points equally distant from the centre).
Then there was the other metric which was much more closely related to the traditional Euclidean metric that we all use every day to measure distances in flat space. In this metric, diagonal distances were basically treated as being 1.5 times longer than the N,S,E,W distances. Compare this with what you'd expect from Euclidean geometry - diagonal distances being approx 1.414... times longer than N,S,E,W distances. Using this metric, you could for example make the increasing city ring sizes still look roughly circular (which they do), as well as ranges for fighters and bombers. This is also the metric usually used for measuring distances like for trade route calculations and city distance costs.
What's my point? My point is that the square based system requires these two distinct metrics, making it inconsistent overall and requiring a decision on which one to use in specific instances. As an example, the blockade range of a naval unit was a 7x7 square in Civ4. I don't think it would have been a bad idea to use a BFC shaped circle of radius 2 either (EDIT, actually I meant a circle of radius 3, which would be a little bigger than the BFC). The fact is one had to be used and not the other.
When we move to a hex based system, it is probably going to become unnecessary to have two different metrics for unit movement and other distance calculations. One will be able to use the SAME metric for both.
IF they did decide to still split things up with two different metrics, I wonder what the "close-to-Euclidean" metric would end up looking like? Would they count moving 1SE then 1SW as being 1.5 distance away instead of 2?
My best guess is that they wouldn't go with something so bizarre and will enjoy not having to worry about having two different metrics!
I apologise now to anyone who hates maths and just read through that.
One of the problems (IMO) that plagued Civ4 and its earlier incarnations was that the designers always had to go with two distinct "metrics" (ways of measuring distances between points). One of the metrics, which dictated how far units could move, basically gave square shapes for equal distances a unit could move. In other words, and this may sound awkward to those people not geometrically inclined, circles were square shaped for that metric. (The definition of a circle being all points equally distant from the centre).
Then there was the other metric which was much more closely related to the traditional Euclidean metric that we all use every day to measure distances in flat space. In this metric, diagonal distances were basically treated as being 1.5 times longer than the N,S,E,W distances. Compare this with what you'd expect from Euclidean geometry - diagonal distances being approx 1.414... times longer than N,S,E,W distances. Using this metric, you could for example make the increasing city ring sizes still look roughly circular (which they do), as well as ranges for fighters and bombers. This is also the metric usually used for measuring distances like for trade route calculations and city distance costs.
What's my point? My point is that the square based system requires these two distinct metrics, making it inconsistent overall and requiring a decision on which one to use in specific instances. As an example, the blockade range of a naval unit was a 7x7 square in Civ4. I don't think it would have been a bad idea to use a BFC shaped circle of radius 2 either (EDIT, actually I meant a circle of radius 3, which would be a little bigger than the BFC). The fact is one had to be used and not the other.
When we move to a hex based system, it is probably going to become unnecessary to have two different metrics for unit movement and other distance calculations. One will be able to use the SAME metric for both.
IF they did decide to still split things up with two different metrics, I wonder what the "close-to-Euclidean" metric would end up looking like? Would they count moving 1SE then 1SW as being 1.5 distance away instead of 2?
My best guess is that they wouldn't go with something so bizarre and will enjoy not having to worry about having two different metrics!
I apologise now to anyone who hates maths and just read through that.
Shurdus
Am I Napoleon?
That is actually an excellent point about the metrics... I never thought of it that way.
And now my head hurts.
And now my head hurts.
Trias
Donkey with three behinds
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I've lived cities in cities with organic road networks for most of my life, and never had that problem. In fact, I have the opposite problem in grid based cities; I can never quite tell where I am (without looking at street signs). I also find grid based cities a pain to navigate by bike, because I have to cross an intersection every 100 meters or so. Compare that to the 3 intersection that I cross biking 9km to work everyday.
I think the thing you are saying is that urban planning (in general) was a huge improvement over not planning at all. (It took the Belgians a while to catch on to that one, and you can easily see the result.)
The problem with cities like DC is that they take the worst of two worlds. It is a grid but not quite.
Yes, that is why new urban development in the old world never adopted a grid system.
Because it is significantly superior. No, grid based planning is mostly just cheap and lazy.
Alternatively, they could use the letters on the keyboard. The letters U, I, H, K, N, and M would work fine on my keyboard.
I would just eliminate 7,8 and 9. 1=DL, 4=UL, 5=U, 6=UR, 3=DR and 2=D. There is no need of a center key that the square formation only has because of the square configuration of the keys. So you have your six directions in a slightly flattened form. Personally I think that would even be easier to handle with the keypad than the grid movement in the long run.
SammyKhalifa
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Because you live there. Try entering a foreign city for the first time (before Google and GPS) and doing that. The grid system is good in that it's pretty standard between different cities.
I live in Pittsburgh, where by necessity the streets are laid out according to geography. The downtown is in the center of a "Y" shaped river system, with tall hills and steep valleys on every side. Most streets run parallel to the river, so they meet in the middle in crazy angles. All traffic entering the city from the South does so though a tunnel dug through a mountain, which then branches out in a dozen or so directions. People get lost. It would be much easier to know that your destination is on 9th street and you're on 7th.
Anyway. I'm not some hardcore defender of traffic grids. It's kind of funny that there's been this much discussion about it, actually. It doesn't bother me that squares aren't as mathematically correct as hexes (and I don't understand why anyone cares), and I like heading due North-South-East-West. But I understand why they made the change, and it doesn't bother me either.
Consider this a pedantic point if you will, but indications so far is that U and D as you describe them are not the available directions but rather East and West. Maybe you'd instead eliminate 3,6 and 9 then?
I don't really care about it that much. It just crossed my mind is all.
Shurdus
Am I Napoleon?
Is any one stull moving units with the keyboard rather than with the mouse? I mean, with the mouse you can click and never make any single error, with the keyboard you can make some nasty mistakes. Also my right hand is on the mouse all the time, my left on the keyboard for worker shortcuts and scrolling with the arrow keys. I do not want to shift my left hand all the time.
SammyKhalifa
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