Originally posted by Drakken
I'm not sure if it has been suggested or not. I believe the singlemost important change would be to make a hex based mapping system. this silly checkerboard with diagonal moves makes me crazy. It is time for Civ to become a real wargame with a more realistic mapping and movement system.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I'd rather
not see a change to hexes. Yes, I understand that being able to move diagonally bothers some people since you can move much further (by a factor of 1.4, roughly) if you go corner-to-corner rather than face-to-face. But hexes have their problems. For one thing, there's only 6 possibly directions you can move in rather than 8. For another, I like the fact that squares (or diamonds) let you use the cardinal directions: N, S, E, W, and NE, SE, NW, SW. You lose this with hexes. And having those as the possible moves works very nicely with the numeric keypad on keyboards, while having six moves would require something a little less intuitive.
If hexes were arranged so that E and W were aligned with faces of the hexes, then to go straight N or S, you'd have to zig-zag, which to me would be even more annoying than the diagonal moves with the current system. What's more, the NW, NE, SW, and SE faces of the hexes wouldn't really be directly in those directions, since each face of a hex is 60 degrees different (instead of 90 for a square, or 45 counting diagonals). So if one face was due W, the next face clockwise wouldn't be straight NW, it would be somewhere between NW and N, and the next would be between N and NE, with, as I said, no way to go straight N.
I've played plenty of wargames (and RPGs) where hexes were used, and I think they're great for local maps, where movement relative to other units is most important and it doesn't really matter which way north is. But for the world-spanning map of Civ, I'd rather have N, S, E, and W be clear. Civ isn't strictly a wargame: battles are stategic, not tactical.
Any movement system with discrete locations (as opposed to a continuous map with no hexes OR squares) is going to have its limitations. I'm not blindly opposed to hexes, I just think its kind of silly how much some people think that a square-based movement system is the worst part of Civ. I think it's served the game well for three different releases, and while switching in the 4th to hexes instead might improve a few aspects, I think it would detract just as much as it helped. I say that Civ 4 should either do away with tiles altogether and go continous, or, better yet, stick with the simple, intuitive,perfectly adequate system that's currently used. For what it's worth, my wife liked Civ 1's system best, where the squares were arranged so that N,S,E,and W were staright and NE, SE, etc were diagonal. She complained that the Civ 2/3 system, with N,S, etc being the diagonals, made it harder to see where you were going without actaully changing the mechanics at all. She's what I'd call a casual player, and I just bring her opinion up to point out that what appeals to a casual player can be very different from what appeals to a hardcore gamer. Personally I like Civ 3 the best so far, but Civ 1 had a much broader appeal, and I hope Civ 4 doesn't keep moving in a direction catering to serious gamers only and ignoring the casual player.
