Civ on a globe

Wouldn't it be fun if for Civ VII everything took place on an actual globe? All these "true start" maps are wildly out because the distances are all wrong. Moscow to Washington should run over the North Pole, not over Europe. Africa is much larger than it looks on most maps.

It should be possible - take a look at this, which is Minesweeper on a globe:

 

What, and perpetuate the NASA lie that we live on a spinning ball?

Just kidding. I think it would make a lot of sense, and be a refreshing change.

 

It gets a little awkward in that it doesn't tesselate perfectly, but seems like there should be easy ways around that - ie. have a section for both poles which are impassable tiles, and then you just need to make sure the handful of spots on the globe where you have to fit in a pentagon are impassable/natural wonders if you don't want certain tiles to have different movement rules. But I definitely think it's well past time for that to be a possibility.

 

Praise Sobek, God of The Nile, Vitalizer of All Men's Sperm!

 

Civ4 did this more or less.

 

Civ IV didn't really do this, though. It just looked that way when you zoomed out because they had some special graphics magic. The map itself was a flat rectangle with squares on it.

I guess it'd be neat to see globe maps, but only if they can do it for all maps and not just for TSL or something. I don't much care about TSL maps.

 

Hexes on sphere..?? Impossible

 

There are precisely 12 pentagons on globesweeper. Doesn't matter the size of the sphere, because it is based on the buckyball and the hexes just sort of scale up and out as they get further away from the pentagons.

The pentagons will be opposite each other, so making two of them poles would be easy. The other ten would be at oddly specific wonder locations, two staggered circles of five wonders at latitudes equidistant from the equator, just a bit north and south of the tropics. So, for example:

0, +30;
18, -30
36, +30
54, -30
72, +30
90; -30
108; +30
126; -30
144; +30
162; -30

Shift that any number of degrees east or west, and that is where you would need all of your impassable wonders to line up with (I am presuming a latitude of +/-30 intuitively, but without actually doing the math I could be wrong on that number).

It would actually make for a very consistent, balanced map, assuming we had a fairly even TSL spread. I'm just not sure if we could find ten good wonders to line up with ten specific locations across those latitudes.

 

I've been advocating for a spherical world map for years. Definitely something that I would like to see in Civ VII. I've always been bothered by the disproportional amount of tundra and ice in the game.

And I don't think the pentagons would have to be necessarily impassible. Are they radically different sizes than the hexes? Also, does the number of pentagons increase as the number of hexes increases? e.g. bigger map = more hexes?

 

I literally just said in the post above you. Always twelve pentagons. In theory we could have more but there's little reason to.

Impassibility is actually a nice compromise, because it's not the size that matters but the number of adjacent hexes. It just wouldn't be fair to arbitrarily allow some spaces to have fewer adjacencies/vulenerabilities than others. Better to just prevent the player from occupying them at all.