Flat earth society?

[Tech Osen]

Do you think the game (future versions that is) would improve by using an actual, round globe as a map? Of course this means that not every tile will have the same size or even shape but that matters little in the game mechanics. Found this website of someone that's been working on globes: https://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation

Just imagine...

 

[ghost88]

Do you think the game (future versions that is) would improve by using an actual, round globe as a map?

View attachment 503619

No.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Why not? Civ 4's map could be zoomed out to globe level. It would be a cool extra to include in the game as well.

That said, probably not in Civ 6

 

[ghost88]

Why not? Civ 4's map could be zoomed out to globe level. It would be a cool extra to include in the game as well.

That said, probably not in Civ 6

Civ IV's map lost the squares ( this was before hex's) long before full zoom out, and at that point added areas that were not on the zoomed in maps (the Poles). The OP's example includes the Poles as playable. A map where the map is spherical would cause the game to be needlessly more complicated as to playability. That said if like in IV you could just zoomed out to a globe that would not be a bad Idea (imho). I doubt though it will ever be done as I am certain a Handheld device like Switch or Ipad could not handle the graphics or screen resolution for the Civ IV type maps. I fear this will be the case for the Civ franchise for the near term. Civ's corporate masters seem to care nothing at all for their core gamers and pursue profits regardless of the longtime fans of Civilization. This I believe will eventually lead to the loss of we fans who actually give a damn about this franchise.

 

[Zaarin]

I seem to recall the devs saying there were technical issues that weren't worth the payoff. That being said, the current maps are cylinder shaped, not flat. I imagine at some point in the future this may happen, but it seems to me like something that would be more valuable in a sci-fi 4X than a historical one. (I have to say, a 4X game with full scale game play on both a space and planetary level would appeal to me greatly, but I'm afraid both sides would suffer in the process. Plus Beyond Earth has made me very uninterested in original IPs from Firaxis...)

 

[Sostratus]

Do you think the game (future versions that is) would improve by using an actual, round globe as a map?

While Civ4's globe view zoom out was kinda neat, I don't think the current cylindrical style suffers too badly. Any 2d tessellation of a 2d shape can support 3 basic map styles: 'flat', cylindrical and toroidal. Flat is like a scenario map; the edge is the edge. Cylinder has the eastern edge map to the western edge, as we see now. Toroidal would also have the northern edge map to the southern one. I think firaxis could probably make a neat map style along the lines of a "tilted axis" world like they did in Beyond earth where the cold to hot goes east-west instead of north to south. The problem with spheres as a baseline Civ mechanic is that the maneuvers it allows just don't happen in history. The earth's geography doesn't make polar travel convenient- though as has been said, a sci fi setting this might make more sense. I don't think most people's brains would grasp it as easily as a 2d map, and for that reason, I don't think people would really enjoy it.

Plus Beyond Earth has made me very uninterested in original IPs from Firaxis...

They made a few mistakes, which I hope they learned from. I don't know if it is true but my understanding is the whole thing came from some internal work that really got pushed to be a full release when it wasn't. To me, the decision to provide virtually no backstory was the killer. Look, give me a compelling story that bridges current day up to the moment the colony ships land, and people would be into it. It ended up being hollow because you've got some vague stereotypes combined with vague references (the great mistake?! JUST TELL ME WHAT IT IS) so you end up being a sack of bonuses and colors instead of anything that could resemble a nation. Contrast with how they handled the Civ4 mod NextWar: each faction's leader is almost universally stated to be mysterious or enigmatic, but the factions themselves are grounded enough to get us there. America Inc is the english speaking world plus mexico. Why? Because Mr Big conquered it from the great Southern Empire. Why doesn't everyone beat up on the Pan-Asiatic people's cooperative? Because he's got a ton of nukes. Okay, I have enough to grasp the basic geopolitics. I don't know jack about the tensions or motivations of the BE factions. Shouldn't the African union have something to say about Franco-iberia controlling basically western sub-saharan africa? How the hell did china and japan unify? What is going on on planet earth, since we keep trying to connect with them and save them?

/end rant. It had a lot of cool ideas, I mean they even tried out floating cities and having a satellite layer, instant and universal unit upgrades, some other types of stuff. I think BE would work a lot better with Civ6's game engine though. Districts and a split tech & civic tree would be really cool for that kind of game where they really can develop in separate and nonlinear ways.

 

[Zaarin]

@Sostratus I agree with all of that. BE never gave me enough lore to feel invested in the setting, so it consequently felt extremely bland and generic, despite having some good ideas mechanically.

 

[Greywulf]

I can see this happening some day, though we might have to wait a while. Perhaps Civ VIII will incorporate such a map.

 

[UWHabs]

The simplest reason is that it complicates things. You lose the ability to neatly under the covers number the tiles in a simple grid (or pseudo-grid). Plus you now have to deal with the pentagons that come out with a hex tiling of a sphere, which simply complicates things.

They're not completely impossible to fix - you could simply make the pentagons that show up as impassable tiles, like natural wonders, ice, mountains, etc... But not sure it's really worth the return. More likely is you just change the rendering to have the tiles of unequal size -something like this: https://www.kisspng.com/png-hexagonal-tiling-hex-map-sphere-tabla-1149856/preview.html Then it at least "looks" like a globe, although your equatorial tiles are a lot bigger than the polar ones.

 

[playshogi]

I don't see why there couldn't be a north and south pole. Currently the top and bottom of the map are hard edges, but by moving for example onto the top edge you could then move to any hex along the top edge.

 

[ZimZum514]

@Sostratus I agree with all of that. BE never gave me enough lore to feel invested in the setting, so it consequently felt extremely bland and generic, despite having some good ideas mechanically.

This is a total side note to the conversation, but I could not agree more! I wanted so badly to love BE, but couldn't because I never had a good way to hook into the narrative behind the game.