Maps that allow crossing of north and south poles

[Happiness]

A starting position near the poles tends to hinder expansion, because you can't build cities in half of the directions. If maps allow crossing of poles, then it would be more fair to players with a polar starting position. Right now, civ maps depict a cylindrical earth and not a spherical one.

If you prefer a game that is more realistic, we can limit polar crossing with a tech and/or with some cost of gold/faith (you need faith that you will return home safely before you will embark on a polar crossing) and/or reserve the ability for certain units.

Example
Name the hex's in the first row of a map as A1, A2, ... A100. Currently going right from A100 brings you to A1. With polar crossing, going up from A1 will bring you to A51. The "complexity" of these 2 algorithms are the same. So I don't see why polar crossing is not implemented.

Or is there a mod for this that I'm unaware of?

 

[Amrunril]

This would be an interesting way of moving closer to a spherical world without the technical demands of creating a truly spherical map (I'm not sure how the graphical representation would work, though. That said, I don't think it would make much of a difference to the strength of polar starts. The lack of workable tiles is a much bigger issue for these starts than the physical edges of the map.

 

[Sostratus]

Civ4 had a map option for some worlds called "toroidal." This wrapped the north border to the south. It was available on maps like great plains, which were more regions than planets. (obviously named because such a planetary topology would imply it's a giant donut world, i.e., torus)

So long as you can't zoom out enough to see the entire map at once, such a thing can be displayed in a trivial manner.

A starting position near the poles tends to hinder expansion, because you can't build cities in half of the directions. If maps allow crossing of poles, then it would be more fair to players with a polar starting position.

This isn't necessarily an advantage. While you can't expand north, for example, you're also protected from hostile powers in that direction. It's a bit of a two edged sword. We'd also have to consider the fact that early units probably can't trek across the icecaps to venture over the poles- in fact very few things in the scope of the game can make such a crossing!

Right now, civ maps depict a cylindrical earth and not a spherical one.

Because of the ice caps being at both poles, if we slice those regions off a globe, we can unwrap it into a cylinder. So our maps do a pretty good job of handling spherical earth-like worlds. Unfortunately, a true spherical map also means that we need a 3d map, because our tiles are all of equal size. In reality, there would need to be "fewer" tiles at high latitudes because the sphere's radius shrinks. So you'd need a 3d map where players are on the surface of the sphere, and then you could support rotating it any which way and doing arctic crossings and so forth. The curvature would be quite noticeable on small maps, though- and i'm not even sure one can actually tessellate hexagons in three dimensions without a few cheat tiles thrown in. Such a setup would make for a great space-based game... but for historical Civ, I think the gameplay experience demands our cylindrical + possible toroidal map paradigm.

Look up what Civ 4's maps could look like when you zoomed out. They went from flat to globes- it was very cool. Recreating that feature would be a popular touch, I reckon.

 

[jozef57]

A starting position near the poles tends to hinder expansion, because you can't build cities in half of the directions. If maps allow crossing of poles, then it would be more fair to players with a polar starting position. Right now, civ maps depict a cylindrical earth and not a spherical one.

If you prefer a game that is more realistic, we can limit polar crossing with a tech and/or with some cost of gold/faith (you need faith that you will return home safely before you will embark on a polar crossing) and/or reserve the ability for certain units.

Example
Name the hex's in the first row of a map as A1, A2, ... A100. Currently going right from A100 brings you to A1. With polar crossing, going up from A1 will bring you to A51. The "complexity" of these 2 algorithms are the same. So I don't see why polar crossing is not implemented.

Or is there a mod for this that I'm unaware of?

i agree, anyway i would love more differant maptypes like we had before and please please we need bigger maps. even on huge map i only play with 6 or max 7 empires otherwise not enough space!!!!

 

[Turrdy]

acktchually, you could make a spherical map by making some of the tiles pentagons instead of hexagons (just like on a football). the map then automatically needs to be 3D. you can adjust the size/curvature by the ratio of pentas to hexes.

Spoiler Like This: :

That would change the rules of Civ pretty drastically though, think about adjacency bonuses of a pentagon for example...