How big should hexes be?

[Hormagaunt]

With the largest Earth map, the map is 128 hexes across. Given a circumference of 40,075 kilometres (24,900 miles), that figures out to 313 km (194.5 mi) across each hex.

Personally, I think hexes should be no more than about 20 km (12.5 mi) across. That would make a huge board that's actually huge (2,000 hexes).

 

[Junuxx]

That would take way too much memory.

 

[PawelS]

This can be done if the game only uses simple 2D graphics (something like the strategic view). But I wouldn't like to play such game, managing thousands of cities isn't fun. Such thing would be good only for the "realism junkies"

 

[LordTC]

If you use only 2D graphics you lose access to most of the resources on video cards. For the Glory used a 2D system and they couldn't edit the game into something much larger because the 2D system wouldn't be able to make use of the video ram or video processing, just the core system stuff. It ended up as a few thousand province game.

 

[zonk]

This can be done if the game only uses simple 2D graphics (something like the strategic view). But I wouldn't like to play such game, managing thousands of cities isn't fun. Such thing would be good only for the "realism junkies"

That's not true --

All of Paradox's new titles under the new Clausewitz engine are 3D based - and HOI3, for example, has somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 "provinces".

 

[PawelS]

That's not true --

All of Paradox's new titles under the new Clausewitz engine are 3D based - and HOI3, for example, has somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 "provinces".

It's almost the same as in Civ5, which has about 10,000 hexes on Huge maps.

 

[PawelS]

If you use only 2D graphics you lose access to most of the resources on video cards. For the Glory used a 2D system and they couldn't edit the game into something much larger because the 2D system wouldn't be able to make use of the video ram or video processing, just the core system stuff. It ended up as a few thousand province game.

Well, I think "just the core system stuff" is good enough to run a 2D game, like in the "ancient" pre-3D times. It's easier than 3d because you only need to display the portion of the map that is currently visible instead of creating an entire 3d environment.

 

[elthrasher]

With its land area of 790 km, New York City wouldn't quite fit into one of your 20km hexes, but most cities would. So maybe that's a logical place to start. 1 city = 1 hex.

However, you can't just scale up like that and have anything resembling the original game. If the world is 128 hexes in circumference, that means it would take 32 turns for a horseman to gallop around the world (assuming flat terrain and contiguous landmass). IIRC, a turn is anywhere from 40 years to 1 year, which still means it takes kind of a stupid long time to ride a horse around the world.

However with a 2000 hex circumference, it's now going to take you 500 turns to circumvent the globe! That is the entire span of human history! Sheesh it takes a long time!

So you could have a super huge map, but without scaling everything else up appropriately, you wouldn't wind up with a playable game. Oh let's see, Egypt wants me to go to war with England. Looks like it'll take about 350 turns to get there. Hopefully they can still be defeated by spearmen in 2000 AD.

 

[UWHabs]

2000 hexes across is way too big. For a huge map, 500 wouldn't be out of the question. Something like 500X200 I think is reasonable if you want to simulate an "Earth" sized map. The scale for ranged combat is still off (an archer in 2000BC I don't think could fire an arrow at an opponent 30km away), but it would be more reasonable.

Obviously not everyone would like to play on maps that big. But in terms of the "largest" map size, it could be kind of fun to play a really epic game on a map like that. Then a country like France would actually be like 8-10 tiles across.

 

[PieceOfMind]

This can be done if the game only uses simple 2D graphics (something like the strategic view). But I wouldn't like to play such game, managing thousands of cities isn't fun. Such thing would be good only for the "realism junkies"

Honestly I don't think it has much to do with graphics.

Really the limitation is actually a combination of
1) the game's complexity and how well it is programmed to manage it
2) current physical hardware limitations (mainly CPU and RAM)

 

[Zyxpsilon]

AFAIC, it really doesn't matter how proportions are rendered on the gameplay field (sic-world map).
If hex tiles represent a virtual spot where Units & Cities are located, move into, stand in and obey my clickable orders -- so be it.

Besides, i don't want to fry the CPU, the GPU, personal brain cells, 500+/-Gigs worth of solid-state magnetized metal plates, microchips electronically soldered on a Mobo to fit transistor pipelines -- all of which 64 bits wide or less.

By the time smoothly aliased pure reality hits the gaming world hardware, i'll be long dead and buried under tons of rubble.

Small but strange hexes, it is. Fair enough. Use your imagination.

 

[rujikin]

Over 9000!!!!

 

[LordTC]

There isn't a realistic solution.. I'd say if I play a Earth Map on Huge then before the modern era (WWII technologies) I shouldn't have bombardments that go across the English Channel. But longbows have range 3, so you need Paris and London to basically be 5 tiles away. On that scale you probably need more than even 2000 tiles for the world.

Regarding 2d vs 3d, I bring it up because ForTheGlory (FTG) was a EU2 remake in modern times using the 2d engine that had a lot of problems trying to get the systems to run huge maps smoothly and reliably when they played around with removing the hard cap (I believe instead of removing it they doubled or tripled it, but this isn't nearly enough scale improvement).

 

[CivFanaticMan]

realism is not part of games(.)

 

[Junuxx]

But longbows have range 3, so you need Paris and London to basically be 5 tiles away. On that scale you probably need more than even 2000 tiles for the world.

Actually, with Hormagaunt's proposed scale of 20 km per tile, London and Paris would be roughly 17 tiles apart

 

[Skwink]

20 km of hexes would melt my computer.

 

[Hormagaunt]

Finally did a bit of measuring. The Earth map (huge) is 128 x 80 hexes. That's 10,240 hexes (including the Arctic and Antarctic ones). The Great Plains (huge) is about 72 x 56. That's 4,032 hexes.

I wonder if a 2,000 x 2,000 Earth map could be done with Civ4 graphic quality. They aren't as detailed as Civ5, but on the other hand they're animated and in that regard look better than Civ5. Anybody notice that in Civ4 the workers do the same thing, but out of step, and one will take a break while the other works? In Civ5 they all do the same thing at the same time, right down to wiping the sweat off their foreheads.

Anyway, 2K x 2K; *that* would be a good-sized huge map.

 

[Skwink]

Finally did a bit of measuring. The Earth map (huge) is 128 x 80 hexes. That's 10,240 hexes (including the Arctic and Antarctic ones). The Great Plains (huge) is about 72 x 56. That's 4,032 hexes.

I wonder if a 2,000 x 2,000 Earth map could be done with Civ4 graphic quality. They aren't as detailed as Civ5, but on the other hand they're animated and in that regard look better than Civ5. Anybody notice that in Civ4 the workers do the same thing, but out of step, and one will take a break while the other works? In Civ5 they all do the same thing at the same time, right down to wiping the sweat off their foreheads.

Anyway, 2K x 2K; *that* would be a good-sized huge map.

Couldn't be done without a SUPER-DUPER computer.

 

[Akkon888]

Oi, 4,000,000 hexes. What a huge game it would be; probably it would take months to reach a decisive point.

1UPT would not be so bad here as well. The time scale may also need reducing, maybe by a factor of 10?

I would absolutely love to play this new game that has:

-4,000,000 hexes
-1UPT
-Strong Multiplayer capacities (possibly 48-144 players)
-Such dynamic and different resources like the ones in Civ4
-Competent AI (this would take a while to develop, I would prefer huge multiplayer games)
-Great/Less expensive buildings like the ones in Civ4
-More specific units for specific eras
-The ability to conglomerate a formation of units into a front, which can be controlled/moved/rotated in any direction with just a few clicks (NOT 1000s of clicks)
-Time at 4000 BC starting at rates of 4 years - in the Modern Era, turns pass by weekly
-It doesn't need the great graphics; nice 128 x 128 2D sprites and health bars and such are fine with me (anti-aliasing doesn't matter that much either to me)
-Ranged units, that actually seem more realistic.
-Multi-level mountains, for example hills, high hills, crossable mountains, and impassable mountains
-A nice built in voice chat system such as ventrilo or skype (this would keep everyone on for hours)
-More permanent diplomatic events (no more 10-turn peace treaties, each negotiation counts for quite a while)
-A 1-3 turn period of time to make decisions before actually voting on a resolution/gifting a tech/accepting a peace treaty
-Game speed could be increased by dividing the map into several 1000 areas around 1000-2000 tiles in size; this could render the area YOU are looking at much faster, and it would not impose nearly as much processing power on the other 1000s of areas (kind of like how a computer doesn't use RAM to store a 10 GB program, for example)

I am kinda sorry I just rambled on a bit, these ideas just kept popping in my head and I felt like posting them. The point is that I would love 20km hexes.

 

[Bibor]

They should be really big. Like a hippo. Or an elephant, perhaps.