Civ 6 idea - What about simply getting rid of tiles?

[killmeplease]

RPG's are often turn-based without having tiles. Divinity OS and Dragon Age Origins are a few examples. There are excellent UI solutions for the issues you're mentioning.

But what these RPG's always have is a limitation to the amount of units you can have. Otherwise things can become a mess. Already graphically it looks bad when more than one unit is occupying the same space, but with a limited party number you can still more or less work out who is where and who is doing what.
But imagine a Civ game with no tiles and an unlimited army number - Shaka assaulting a city with a few dozen impi and some ranged backup. Against Japan who also also have lots of units. How to prevent that from becoming a mess?
I only know games where there are either tiles or there is a strict unit limit to keep things manageable.

hmm thanks i have to check those games
btw its not only about movement, but also city management. city spacing, area calculation etc. you wont be able to judge how much res will a certain area produce, what the size of that area, how fast culture can spread onto it etc. there will be big non-integer numbers just everywhere which are hard to perceive.

in a TBS its hard to get rid of tiles. tiles make things so much more managable with a bunch of units.

what I propose is smaller tiles. small as no other cic game has done before. small enouch that a city is 7hexes and rivers are a hex wide(at least downsream...), but most terrain, resources and stuff still generate at the normal size at 7 hexes (unless you want to eat up a ton of CPU)

pop can be in much smaller increments (start with 10 pop instead of 1) and welll... everything can move out faster. you can now move your army in proper formation even through narrow passages, border grouth and everything can be more natural as well.

more tiles you have less manageable it become. compare city screen in civ4- ("big fat cross", 20 tiles) and civ5 (36 tiles in 3 rings). this is relieved though by the fact you dont have full radius before late in the game. same to unit movements. faster the movements, harder the management and less meaningful is the combat as units have more targets to attack.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Get rid of tiles. No.
Make tiles untied from tile grid? I really enjoied the BE expansion rising tides, where the ocean world got deeper, tiles got more depth.
I'm not ready to say goodbye to tiles.

 

[primem0ver]

Going tile-less isn't necessary for spherical worlds— this guy, for instance, came up with a pretty cool approach using irregular tiles.

I have been all for getting rid of traditional tiles for slightly irregular tiles like the one above as well to create spherical maps.

I was involved in a very in depth technical discussion that a good portion of was spent discussing this very issue in my Civ IV modding days. It starts with the desire to have realistic, spherical maps that do away with the traditional tile system and it takes off from there discussing many different aspects of attempting this. It will give you a very good idea of what is and isn't possible. It starts here and goes on for more than eight discussion pages (160+ posts). Please note that other topics are being discussed inside of our large discussion. There are so many things that could benefit from coming up with a working system like this. It boils down to using triangle shaped tile pieces that lend itself to using a grid of points rather than tiles (See my EDIT below)

However, there is one problem with using such a system. The meshes used to create the 3D globe cannot simply be stretched slightly like a 2D texture can. So it is no longer possible to duplicate the same set of meshes over and over like what is used in current Civ Games since every "tile" (face) is different. Each mesh must be dynamically created to adjust for the irregularities in size. This takes time and memory.


EDIT: The thread I refer to above discusses the pros and cons of abandoning tiles in detail. Ultimately we decided that using some sort of grid was necesssary. Here is my post mentioned above which discusses the benefits of abandoning the traditional tile based grid system and using a grid point system instead. Keep in mind though the however listed above. This is still a significant consideration.

 

[Spartan_X]

I think a Civ game without tiles could work great. The game would still be played in turns, but units could move only certain distances in the map. Also you could stack units in "armies". Yeah, i think it could work. Judging by the screenshots however, if that is ever the next big change in the map after the square tiles and hexagons ... we're going to see it in Civ VII or later.