Map Grid: On or Off?

[pdescobar]

I leave it always on, all the time, because I make too many movement mistakes with it off. On civ2 and smac the underlying grid was still discernable enough to me that I could leave it off after I played a couple games but in Civ3 I cannot. In a sense, the terrain art is too good in that I lose the feel of the underlying grid without the overlay. While that's great for screenshots, it's horrible (to me) for gameplay, so I have to keep the grid on.

The only exception is in making terrain screenshots for the library; my impression is that people generally like the grid off on screenshots so I've tried to remember to remove it there.

 

[MadScot]

Always on. Like Anarres, I am irritated by having to turn it on every time. At least there's a shortcut for that.

Brought up on chess and "proper" wargames. Only problem I have is that it is a GRID. I want hexes. I want the shortest distance between two points to be a single straight line.

 

[gskyes]

Mostly off.

I will turn it on when planning city placement. So, basically I have it on during the expansion phase and turn it off afterwards. But, sometimes I leave it on and sometimes I leave it off and most of the time I barely notice it anyway.

 

[bladester]

I have it on when I remember to turn it back on. It would be nice to have it saved like some people have mentioned above also.

 

[Romanus]

Im also a veteran of the 'manual' wargames, ie 6th Fleet, Flat Top, Ogre, and many others.....so its just something im comfortable with.

 

[general_kill]

I leave it on, occasionally off when i forget to turn it on when i load a game.

 

[Turner]

Before I started PBEMing, it was always on.

Since PBEMing, most of the people I play against have it off, so I only notice it about five hours after starting an SP game.

So I'm moving from Mostly On to Mostly Off.

I still like them on. For some reason I have a hard time seeing the board properly, and judging where to plop down that settler.

It would be nice if there was an 'undo last action' button. . . Yes, I know, we've discussed it before.

 

[Jaybe]

Mostly off, but turn it on occasionally for city placement, more often for when I want to count unit movement, especially for coordinating naval units of high movement (destroyers, etc.).

 

[superslug]

I may actually have a unique preference here, I turn it on and off depending on the terrain variation. Some maps have huge swaths of similar terrain, in which case I do use it. Other maps have variety, and it's not as needed. I do use it when moving anything naval. I guess ocean counts as a huge swath of similar terrain.

 

[Cilpot]

Off, off... Aestetics comes first! But it is handy in some cases, like Yoda mentioned when building maps...

 

[Darkness]

Mostly off, just switch it on to check things, like city placement...

 

[JJP]

Always off.

 

[torrasque]

Mostly on, the habit goes back to when I played Civ2. I always would send my men the wrong way because I wasn't sure which way was which. Now I leave it on, it's useful for city planning and troop movement, especially over the weird Civ3-style railroads. I turn it off when I want to get a good look at the map, or when I zoom out to check the overall situation.

And of course, we have the obligatory voter who just HAS to select the 'different' option.

 

[Alexnm]

Mostly off. When they are on, the map loses some of its organic feel to me. But I turn it on occasionally, just to check out some things.

 

[Chieftess]

Always on. A good number of times, I have sent a worker one way thinking the roads extended there and they didn't. Plus, it's good for city placement, too.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

Always on.

I want to be able to quickly count distances and so for me it has to say on.

 

[tao]

Always on; reasons given above. Well. Nearly. When I ctrl-shift-M to spot resources and zoom out to small size tiles, I sometimes switch off the grid to have less clutter. But very very rarely.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Always off - it's just too ugly.

I rarely have any trouble telling how much city radii overlap or similar, nor with moving units the wrong way.

Something that does not too unfrequently cause me to move units the wrong way is having my right hand on row higher or lower on the nummeric keypad than I think. This is of coursed caused by repeatedly moving my hand form the mouse to the keypad and back without looking. They should be making the arrow symbols on the keys in shallow relief ...

 

[THX]

Alway off. Sometimes it would be useful to be on, but I forget that I can turn it on. It is distracting.

 

[Mariusz]

Always on.
When I started playing Civ3 I had to play with grid on because tiles are bigger than in Civ2.
After some time I got used to the grid so much that I can't play without it.

Although I think that the map looks much better without the grid.