I know the game is in it's very early stages and I am sure things will change dramatically as time goes on. With that said, the planetary view window is great and all but it is very reminiscent of GalCiv2 (feels like I am in the old GalCiv2 tremendously - too much). Even though the move to hex tiles is great - I myself was hoping that this aspect of the game would evolve past GalvCiv2.
Has the development team considered a geodesic sphere format for the planetary view screen? Granted some of the tiles are pentagons rather than just simply hexagons but it would be very cool (and aesthetically compatible with the space view) to have a rotatable planet with little 3d improvements on the given tiles. Perhaps you could even switch back and forth between a 2D and 3D view.
This may be an over the top (and for all I know impractical) suggestion but I think it would help elevate GalCiv3 visually and give it a fresh feel to further distinguish itself from it predecessor while keeping true to the 'feel' of the franchise. Plus the odd Pentagon tiles could add to the gameplay/strategy of the planet overall.
Just a thought.
I'd like this, but I don't feel it is necessary. Good idea though! :3
This wouldn't add much in my opinion. It's fluff and the as much as things should change, I can't see why a 3d screen would truly make the game better.
it does look futurey
DARCA.
Besides the visuals, what would that add to the game? As far as I can tell, this would make it much harder to see what you have built on the planet. You'd need to scroll around in order to find every improvement. The 2D screen is much better in that regard.
I'm happy with the 2D map (vs a 3D one). Plus no pentagons ruining the landscape.
2d is fine.
It may be more realistic but for the game 2d is easier to navigate.
I like it and think it is really interesting idea but agree that usability/readability would perhaps be compromised.
I do like the idea of planetary improvements having more of an impact on the visuals of that planet in the galactic map though...It is something that Sins and Endless Space did (to some extent) and I have always really liked it.
Agreed. It's a cool idea, but would compromise the functionality of the interface.
I like this idea a lot. Perhaps for more realism and to eliminate pentagons, we could make all tiles on planets triangles. These tessellate perfectly to form a geodesic dome. Furthermore, I hope that over time, the planetary map becomes larger in area and acquires a greater significance, especially with regard to planetary invasion. Planetary invasion shouldn't be a pure numbers game, it should be an interactive process that involves control over specific strategic areas on a planet and that can end in a draw (ie, two civilizations holding control over different parts of the same planet).
This I totally agree with interested in what they are doing with invasion this time. It was way to simplified in GC2.
Even though the bulk of people dislike the notion of a spherical planetary view, I still contend that it would enhance the game. I have recently been playing GalCiv2 again and I do not see how this would detract from game play at all. Plus you could theoretically toggle between a 2d and 3d view. It is nice to see someone else like the idea as well. I still think the Hexagon/Pentagon combo fits in more with the aesthetics of the current game rather than pure triangles (which would be further from what they are doing now).
Regardless of planet size - I agree that some sort of planetary combat should be somewhat interactive as well. Perhaps similar to whatever Stardock has planned for the fleet battles but played on the planet map screen instead of the starfield. The taking over of worlds by an alien civilization is a BIG deal! A ground invasion/occupation is, in many respects, a bigger deal than bypassing the orbital defenses. The falling of worlds shouldn't simply be a numbers game. There is no reason Governors or admirals cannot be assigned to execute these battles for larger galaxy maps later in the game but I myself would play out each one first hand. The potential for this part of the game could be dramatic and fun. Plus moving to the spherical tessellation could be more flexible allowing the developers to one day have varying planet sizes - rather than a fixed 2d board.
Also, going back to the the pentagon tiles, they could add to the planet's overall strategy. Initially when you are colonizing a world, due to the fact that they have less sides, the pentagons could play against the player in the placement of improvements but later in the game they could play to the benefit of the the player strategically if we did ever receive planetary invasion/ground combat mechanics. Your main city or special/unique improvements placed on pentagon tiles are more protected from ground invasion troops.
Would you mind explaining why you feel that this would enhance gameplay? The only things I can think of is that it looks kind of nice, and that map edge tiles no longer exist and so would not be limited in the number of potential adjacent tiles (on the other hand, in my experience it's rather rare to have more than half the potential number of adjacent tiles as actual adjacent tiles anyways, so who cares?). However, it also hides tiles from view, which in my opinion makes it less useful than the flat map. Sure, a sphere is a more 'realistic' depiction of a planet, but the point of the surface map isn't to give me a realistic view of the planet, it's to give me a useful interface for placing planetary improvements, and an interface that hides fully half of the available tiles at any given time and also makes the tiles towards the boundary of the side that I can see appear smaller and off-plane is not an improvement over a flat map.
Moreover, if you wanted to do it 'properly', you'd need to build a more complex model for the planetary improvements, as the current flat images will likely not look good if pasted onto a rotating sphere. Possibly not a full 3D model, but certainly something more than the PNG images we currently have.
As far as the planetary invasion stuff goes, all I'll say is that I find it incredibly amusing that many people object to any direct interference in space battles while thinking that the same thing but applied to planetary invasion is a great idea.
@JoeBall23: Looking at the rest of the planet would be as simple as rotating the map. 3D models are certainly an issue, although I think that they would be a small one compared to the wholesale 3D update that Stardock has brought to the rest of the game. Further 3D models would have to be made for a whole line of Planetary Invasion techs, such as tanks, personnel carriers, ships, you name it.
I don't gather what you mean by "direct interference in space battles". Space battles are already played out on a large map (although I would wholly support a smaller tactical map) but planetary invasion is purely a numbers game. How planetary invasion works in GCII does a terrible injustice to the military, political, economic, and logistical challenges that accompany the conquest of a planet.
But that's not helping matters, because it makes it more difficult to assess the planet as a whole. A globe, while realistic, isn't a really good interface for displaying the information we, as "God-like Emperor" want; we want to be able to quickly look at all the assets a planet has (which include assessing unimproved areas) to see both what's current, and what's possible. Since a globe inherently prevents me from looking at the entire picture at once, it's inferior to an interface (a flat projection surface) that can.
This is plainly one of those places where "realism" and eye-candy get in the way of a functional interface.
Why do you suppose, that despite having recognized that the world is a globe for about half a millenium now (longer, actually, but you get the idea), that military planners still use flat maps? It's not just for the ease of use and being able to fold and store them - it's because globes mask the relative position of distant objects, and also because they require one to *remember* where things are located, not *see* where they are. And that's pretty much the definition of a bad user interface.
A flat surface simply presents the information more comprehensively and intuitively, and if we're not really concerned with actual distances (which we aren't, only relative ones), we don't have to worry about the various cylindrical projection distortions.
The issue of invasion management is a different one, but even there, a flat projection map is a superior UI to a globe.
Also, as noted above, there is no way to make a globe out of a single regular polygon beyond 20 faces (a regular icosahedron), which is smaller than the game maximum. In addition, there is no way to make a globe out of even IRREGULAR polygons of the same shape in a sufficiently large size.
You're always going to be stuck with the Soccerball problem - inserting a couple of different-shaped polygons amidst the others. It's not an insurmountable problem, of course, but, once again, it brings up the issue of dead spaces in the map, which further reduces usability. Because it's going to be a PITA to code up a globe having to worry about two different face sizes and how graphics fit in them.
Take a good look at the rotating solid sphere above, and the soccerball next to it. Notice that all the faces are differently oriented, even those of the same shape. Which means that both the pixmap that shows the terrain, and the buildings themselves, will face different directions (unless, you want the devs to have to make DIFFERENT pixmaps for use in different orientations). It will look ridiculous. Which even further detracts from the usability.
Planetary invasion in GCII is neither more nor less of a numbers game than space combat in GCII is. Space battles occur when you take a little stack of ships and click on some other little stack of ships, while planetary battles occur when you take a little stack of transports and click on an enemy planet. Both of these are decided entirely by the numbers, with a bit of a random factor added in, and choosing which planet to take is as significant a strategic decision as deciding which fleet to fight. Choosing which planet tiles to take with the invasion force and choosing where to go from there is far more involvement in a planetary invasion than you get in space battles, and has no real impact on the overall strategic picture; thus, such involvement is not substantially different than being able to control ships or sets of ships in a space battle, which a vocal group of people on the forums have objected to in the past.
I would also point out that how just about everything military in GCII is a 'terrible injustice to the military, political, economic, and logistical challenges that accompany' just about anything military in GCII. Operating a fleet at the extreme edge of its range should be entirely different from operating the same fleet out of a convenient port, wars have incredibly little impact on approval (same goes for victories and defeats) and the economy (unless your war requires you to further expand your military or switch a significant number of planets over to active ship production to make good losses), technology that isn't marked 'weapon' or 'defense' matters very little in combat, no one cares if you gas a billion people or drop asteroids on major population centers during an invasion, and the espionage system is garbage. This doesn't justify completely redoing the system, as long as the system works well enough for the game.
But why is it better to have to rotate the map when I can see everything I need on the flat map? And no, there's not really a good way to have both a flat and a spherical map where both make use of regular polygons to represent portions of the planet's surface. Ever try making an approximate sphere out of a single piece of paper? It's not at all clear when looking at it when the sections are laid out but before having folded it up which sections of the sheet will be adjacent to other pieces, and the more sections you make the sphere out of the harder it becomes to correctly visualize the adjacencies. If instead you give me a flat hex grid map like we currently have and a spherical projection like that shown at the top of the page, where are the pentagon tiles? Do the adjacency bonuses change based on which view I'm in, since clearly the adjacencies are different, or do they not make sense in one of the two map views? The sphere map is pretty, but it doesn't provide a useful interface, certainly not a more useful interface than the flat map.
I pointed out above:
Wouldn't the complete bitmap of the planet surface/terrain be one image and the grid be a separate layer laid over the bitmap? And even if it wasn't wouldn't the code splice up the bitmap into the appropriate pieces once the planet was generated? Also, the buildings in this hypothetical 3d planetary view would be 3d and you wouldn't have to have differently oriented pixmaps for them at all as they would just be plopped on top of the tile.
And all of that goes against the "realism" factor that having a globe in the first place is supposed to support. Because attacking an arbitrarily 5-sided terrain space should be more difficult that an arbitrarily-sized 6-sided terrain space? Huh? Where's the playability improvement in that?
Plus, have you considered how difficult (and time consuming) it would be to try to run a global conquest with widely dispersed forces if you have to keep constantly spinning the globe to see where everyone is?
Not to mention that we'll see Space Tactical Combat long before we see any sort of planetary Tactical Combat in the GC series.
Skinning a true sphere (or, at least something made via splines/Bezier surfaces) is much simpler, and flat maps are idiot simple. Remember, we're looking at probably a dozen or so different surface designs, and with a 3D solid, you can't efficiently "assemble" a surface texture (i.e. just pick out a pixmap for each hex/pent) and expect it not to look wrong because of the varying orientation of each face, so you *have* to do the skin. We're talking probably 10x the effort to create a skin for a soccerball vs a flat map.Additionally, 3D models of each building are a lot of work. A *lot* of work - GC3 has maybe 200 buildings, so that 200 models vs 200 pixmap images. Plus, even coding up the interface to show a spinning globe with a flat pixmap surface is significantly easier than managing 3D projections from that surface.
Overall, I'd say we're looking at probably at least an engineer/month of work to do the tech stuff, and possibly a couple of artist/months to do all the artwork properly. That's a *significant* outlay in money.
And none of this addresses the issue that a flat surface map is superior in information presentation/density to a globe. Basically, a 3D globe gets you a whole lot of eye-candy, no features that can't be much more simply implemented on a flat surface, and a whole bunch of deficiencies the flat map doesn't have.
I'm not against bling/eye-candy - heck, the whole "watch the ships circle the planet" view in GC2 when you zoomed down was pure eye-candy, and served no purpose at all other than looked real cool. It *is* a game, after all, and looking great is a big selling point.
But functionality/playability over everything else, period. Eye candy you add in AFTER everything else, and is MUST NOT hurt playability. I can't see a globe planet view making that criteria.
Mountainous terrain could be a 5 sided tile. And why are you getting so angry and confrontational? It was just a suggestion/idea. Sorry I brought it up.
Again, the globe could be useful in terms of planetary invasion. Invading a spherical planet is totally different from invading a flat map-style one, since on the flat planet there are edges and on the globe (as in real life) there are not. The logistics associated with the game, invasion routes, etc. would be completely different on a round planet vis à vis a flat one. This is not pure eye candy, it could serve a purpose.
Why shouldn't it justify changing the military system? Honestly, it would probably not take that much effort to create tactical maps (just use the same ship models, perhaps several ships for each fleet, and have them fight in a smaller tactical sum-map). GCII could become a much better game militarily if the true challenges of military use were explored. Stardock shouldn't make a game that functions "well enough"; it should work to make a better and better game. In addition to tactical maps, I would support efforts to place stellar systems within smaller system maps, to reflect the fact that planets orbiting one star are generally not halfway in between their host star and another, but much closer to the host star.
Also, regarding the soccer-ball problem, the issue could be easily resolved by using triangular tiles instead of hexagonal (this could apply to the main map as well although it wouldn't be exactly necessary. This eliminates nearly all of the inconsistencies and discrepancies associated with hexagonal tiles while still allowing for natural, organic terrain to be created. Although pentagons would still be formed by the triangles, they would not have an effect on the movement of units. This makes geodesic spheres a good model to use. Below is an example:
The issue regarding models could be resolved by taking the Civilization model of building construction, creating cities and then constructing buildings inside those cities (farms, mines, lumber mills, field labs, and other tile improvements could be constructed outside). Thus 3D models do not have to be detailed, if they exist at all, and the work of developers is reduced greatly. Since planets would be much larger, Planet Quality would not depend on how many tiles there are to use (although the Habitat Improvement line of techs should still make unusable tiles, which may have strategic resources, Precursor mines/libraries, etc., usable) but would have a certain value for the planet, representing the amount of waste that its ecosystem can process and assimilate while remaining in balance. Buildings and people would produce quantities of waste; while certain techs (Xeno Recycling?) and buildings could reduce the amount of waste, they would not be able to entirely eliminate it. To go beyond the limit of Planet Quality, one would either have to risk crop failures, industrial accidents, and the like on a planet, or would be forced to transport waste between planets (which would be ruinously expensive and would create space junk that harms your spacecraft).
You presume that the map edges are hard boundaries. That's absolutely not necessarily true. It's trivial to hook up the edges with the appropriate other hexes on a flat map. I've played Risk on a Mercator projection map just fine. Using such a map is both obvious to any player looking at a flat map, and simple to do from a coding standpoint, and provides the exact same benefits that a globe would.
For an example, go look at Civilization 3 maps, which allow you to wrap both edges trivially and in a very intuitive and obvious manner.
To say it again. I think the OP is a bad idea. Although the spinning soccer vall is cool.
@trims2u: I have played Civilizations III, IV and V. I know what I am talking about when I want spherical maps. To begin with, the polar regions on a Civ-style map are much, much larger than they would be in real life, and the equatorial regions are consequently relatively smaller. A triangular geodesic sphere would do away with all of these problems.
I read the original post and was like: SWEET BABY JESUS, THAT IS AWESOME. Then I read the first couple comments and was like: Well, it was fun while it lasted.
A problem that is mostly in the eye of the beholder I’m afraid, it seems obvious from most responses in this thread that few people think this is a “problem” worth the effort and resources needed to solve it.
What I’m saying is that most people have no “problem” with the flat map view of their colonies in this type of game and while alternatives may be interesting it adds nothing of great value to the game making it worth retrofitting to the game engine.
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