Sorry. But I fail to see how a unit is given an unfair bonus when it moves diagonally [...] using a square-grid
To
quote the Wikipedia, “The primary advantage of a hex map over a traditional square grid map is that the distance between the center of each and every pair of adjacent hex cells (or
hex) is the same. By comparison, in a square grid map, the distance from the center of each square cell to the center of the four diagonal adjacent cells it shares a corner with is greater than the distance to the center of the four adjacent cells it shares an edge with. This equidistant property of all adjacent hexes is desirable for games in which the measurement of movement is a factor. The other advantage is the fact that neighboring cells always share edges; there are no two cells with contact at only a point.”
When moving diagonally in Civ 4, a given unit moves 41% farther than when moving orthogonally (i.e. North, South, East, or West) but both moves only use one “movement point”. This is unnatural. Also, Civ 4’s pathfinder has this annoying way of choosing a “zig zag” path between two points when a straight path uses the same amount of movement. (Hex grids have the issue that moving east-west takes a little more time than moving north-south, but the error factor is around 16%, i.e. smaller than the 41% error we get on square grids; if more accuracy is needed, C-Evo makes diagonal moves use more movement points on a square grid, and the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise out right invokes Pythagoras when calculating movement distance).
There’s a lot I don’t like about Civ 5, but I believe they fixed a long standing annoyance with the Civilization series when they
finally gave us a hex grid. Also, it’s easier to visualize a “fat hex” than a “fat T” for determining what tiles a given city can get food and resources from. Then again, I
believe Civ 5 and/or Civ 6 no longer use a 2-square fixed distance to determine what tiles a city can work, but I haven’t played them enough to actually know; someone please correct me here.
I think limiting hexes to have only one unit in them in Civ 5 was excessive; I understand classic paper and cardboard war games tried to avoid stacking units for practical logistical reasons, and I think there should be a stacking limit, but it should probably be a number higher than one (I would had made it a number which modders can change and, if desired, make as small as one for simulations of small-scale tactical battles), especially since the Civ 5 and Civ 6 AI can’t handle 1 unit per tile very well. The reason Civ has traditionally had those “stacks of doom” is because one square represents an area hundreds of miles long (e.g. Perfect World’s huge map is 144 units east to west, so each square is about 170 miles long at the equator), and can fit an arbitrarily large number of military divisions.
Since it gets brought up when we have these kinds of discussions: The reason why Civ has never used an actual sphere for the map is because there isn’t a really good way to consistently tile a sphere. There is
always going to be some point on the sphere where the tiling changes, altering the local tactics at that point on the map. One solution I have seen to this is
to make the tiling inconsistent everywhere, but my favorite solution is to allow one to go north at the north pole, but when one does this, they end up halfway across the world at the north pole (and likewise, halfway across the southern edge when going south at the south pole). This is the same as a sphere in the sense that a coffee mug is the same as a doughnut.
