I recently stated that I thoguht GEM was approaching he practical limit for maps in C2C. Howveer, havign thought about it some more I have an idea:
We could use the new multimap capability (when we have it, which will be soon) as follows:
Imagine a truely gargartuan GEM (let's say 1000 X 1000). A player strts as England, and defines his first theatre of war to be a map window onto the British Isles and north western europe. For th first 1000 turns it's probably all they need, so play is essentialyl indistguishable from today's play except for the greater map scale. Much later in the game maybe he establishes colonies in Africa, so he defines a new theatre that covers Africa. The expanded waypoints allow his to define routes for shipping to travel easily btween the home theatre and the African theatre. When playing a turn he essentially plays one theatre then the other (or if he's a diligent micro-manager he chedks out what is happening in each theatre in tun, then goes through them again making moves).
Later still he adds a North American theatre say, and so on...
Note - this is NOT a straightforward use of the multi-map capability since it also requires separating the logic underlying tiles from their map representation, which the basic multimap doesn't do, but I AM convinced it's possible.
We could use the new multimap capability (when we have it, which will be soon) as follows:
- Overall (whole world) map is not used as an actual playing surface. Instead all play takes place on theatre-of-war maps
- Theatre of war maps have a maximum size, probably about half the area of GEM (anything up to GEMish size is possible, but there are advantages performance wise to keeping it lower)
- Play on theatre-of-war maps is just the usual Civ play and rules
- Each theatre-of-war map is just a window into the overall map. Actual movement and fighting etc. really takes place on the entire world model, but it's just that you can never see it all at once
- The overall map display is a 'blocky' picture (for the sake of example suppose each tile represents a 2-by-2 square of 'real' tiles. No units appear on it, though cities probably can, and it can certainly be coloured by culture.
- A UI allows the user to define a new theatre-of-war dynamically by selecting areas of the overal map to include (simplest UI would just set a center point and allow you to control overall heigth and width up to the maximum for a theatre of war map)
- Any defined theatre's of war display as grey outlines on the overall map. They can probably be named, and slected by name from a list or something as well as we see fit
- The user may switch to any selected theatre of war whenever they want to
- Ideally (though not in the first version maybe) we have some sort of multiple waypoint defintuion system so that waypoints can be set up in one theatre and used as destinations from any other (so as to allow for units to traverse long paths, such as across oceans, without having to define a number of intermediary theatres and step them through manually)
Imagine a truely gargartuan GEM (let's say 1000 X 1000). A player strts as England, and defines his first theatre of war to be a map window onto the British Isles and north western europe. For th first 1000 turns it's probably all they need, so play is essentialyl indistguishable from today's play except for the greater map scale. Much later in the game maybe he establishes colonies in Africa, so he defines a new theatre that covers Africa. The expanded waypoints allow his to define routes for shipping to travel easily btween the home theatre and the African theatre. When playing a turn he essentially plays one theatre then the other (or if he's a diligent micro-manager he chedks out what is happening in each theatre in tun, then goes through them again making moves).
Later still he adds a North American theatre say, and so on...
Note - this is NOT a straightforward use of the multi-map capability since it also requires separating the logic underlying tiles from their map representation, which the basic multimap doesn't do, but I AM convinced it's possible.
to me!!
btw, let me know when your ready for me to release, or PM me, thx.
