Here we are in our third version of Galactic Civilizations. I figured maybe we could ditch grids completely. But they do have some use.
Hexes, on the other hand, though having some use, create really silly situations that look down right stupid. For instance, my colony ship is moving to the southern end of the map. On a grid, in the previous games, the ship made a clean arc to the proper rank and then moved in a straight path to the destination.
On the hex-grid, however, the colony ship snakes back and forth every hex, completely destroying any immersion, unless you just happen to be on the perfect rank.
Perhaps it's a back-end thing? Couldn't you use an UI overlay each time you click on a ship to show it's possible range in an arc (with the option to turn it off)?
Couldn't we just measure, like in sandbox style, tabletop gaming, from point to point?
I really cannot stress just how bad Gal Civ III look on a hex-grid.
Captain Tolan T. Grimm
Currently Gal Civ III is not in full support of multi monitor use. This was brought up on the last stream and I believe it is something that will get support either at release or via expansion.
we had a thread going for a while shortly after game was announced asking for multi monitor support
i mentionend in that thread and ill say t again take a look at EVE's ui i think it really works well for being able to move stuff around and make use of multie monitors it could use some improvements imo but overall its hard to beat
Yes I do. I assumed you were being humorous, but you never can tell sometimes with or without smiley faces
Hexes FTW.....!!! You squares dont have a chance!
Let us Voxel you!
If hexes were soooo good why don't we switch our coordinate system around the world to be hex based? It is completely plausible.
Why don't we discuss are in terms of number of hexes that fit into an object instead of the number of squares for area?
I still don't quite understand why Hexes are better than squares.
I guess if you're playing a game where the measured distance your unit travels is important, then hexes are good, because the distance between the center of every hex to the center of an adjacent hex is equal. But in a strategy game like GC, the measured distance isn't important, because everything is measured in tiles, not inches or centimeters. So even though moving three squares diagonally is technically longer if you held a ruler up to the screen than moving three squares left/right or up/down, it doesn't matter, either way you're moving three squares.
Hexes look sci-fi, squares look dorky.
That's really the long and short here folks.
Hexes have been good for movement in tabletop wargames since forever, and I think they're a swell addition to Galciv. I sure hope Stardock fixest the goofy way ships wiggle around them though. It looks crummy.
One question here: what are the advantages of squares over hexes?
Both suffer from the "wiggle" problem when moving distances. Both have the same solution to that problem, which is simply a smooth pathing issue inside the game engine.
Both tessellate just fine.
As has been pointed out, when forming large enough polygon shape made from them, both squares and hexes can be "good enough".
Hexes provide better distance approximation for fixed-increment movement.
Hexes allow fewer adjacencies than squares (6 vs 8), but I can't see that being either an advantage or disadvantage in the big scheme of things.
So, why should we go with squares over hexes? What advantages should make us stick with squares?
And, yeah, I'd love to see multi-monitor support allowing the "management" UI portions to be placed on the 2nd monitor, while leaving the primary one to hold the main space map.
There is no real advantage from using hexes vs. squares. The real advantage of squares is the ability to move from 2D to 3D and keeping a similar coordinate system in place. With hexagons you would be using Hexagonal prisms.
When exploring dungeons I find that squares makes neater walls than hexagons.
I find it interesting that people are so animate about squares vs. hexagons. I like squares due to the way I know how to navigate in the current world and the ease at which I can create right angles. Thus, looking into these games I find it easier to see things in squares where I can make a navigation system that follows something similar to the world around me.
I don't see any real need to move to graphically showing hexagons. We could show everything in terms of squares and still have the strategy provided by the hexagons, by using a brick formation. Why represent it by hexagons. Makes no difference to me.
Triangles have problems with determining things like Zone of Control and adjacency. Which is why hexes are ideal because they give you tessilation and also provide better clarity as to how adjacency and such works. Squares were always ambiguous about waht is 'adjacent'
In your opinion, perhaps.
I still don't see why this matters when the tiles in GCII and GCIII clearly don't represent uniform amounts of space.
Hexes also have six directions of movement along which they will not 'wiggle,' whereas square grids have eight.
As I have said several times so far, including in the post to which you responded and once before in this post, I see no reason why the absolute distance traveled on the grid should matter when the grid tiles clearly do not represent uniform amounts of space. Beyond that, it is also possible to map a circle into a square grid in such a way that moving along the diagonal of the square grid represents moving along a diameter of the circle, which would make the distance distorted by the grid rather than different.
Moreover, when mapping three dimensional surfaces to two dimensional planes, hexagons are at best no better than squares, as far as distorting distances goes, and may even be worse when mapping spheres (and hey, guess what shape planets resemble?) because there is a way to map a rectangular grid onto a sphere which has no non-quadrilateral components in any but the polar regions, while there isn't such a layout for a hexagonal grid. If you're looking at a region of a curved surface which is small enough that it can reasonably be assumed to be flat, then sure, a coarse hexagonal grid works better than a coarse rectangular grid if you're trying to avoid distorting the distances covered by a move action. If you're trying to fit a sphere's surface to a planar grid? Not so much. By the time you're mapping essentially arbitrary points in 3D space to a 2D grid, as is done in the GCII and GCIII game map, the grid already represents something where the distances are so badly distorted that I really must wonder why anyone cares that the length of the diagonal of the square isn't the same as the length of its edge.
Also, the distance isn't that distorted - after all, the distance is in units of tiles, not any absolute distance unit. The tile in the center of a 5X5 square of tiles is two moves away from any tile on the perimeter of the 5X5 square, and 1 move away from the tiles on the perimeter of the 3X3 concentric square, and 3 moves away from any tile on the perimeter of the 7X7 concentric square. Since there's no obvious relationship between the shape of the grid, be it hexagonal or rectangular, and the space represented on the map, why does it matter that the absolute distance between one corner of a square and the diagonally opposed corner is ~40% greater than the absolute distance between the corner and any corner on the same edge while the error in absolute distance is less with a hexagonal grid? The absolute distance on the map has no clear relationship to the absolute distance in the space represented, anyways, regardless of which type of grid you're using, and since it's the move actions which are related to the travel time and moving from any tile to any adjacent tile always costs only one move it doesn't matter for that, either.
Ummm.
There's no difference in a cylindrical projection (which is what a map is of a globe) between using hexes and rectangles. I can create a cylindrical projection onto a grid of hexes just a simply (and accurately) as with squares.
And we're not necessarily talking about the distances a tile actually represents. We're talking about VISUAL distances - visually, it is further going from one corner of a square grid to the opposite corner than it is to an adjacent corner, and that makes a lot of difference when looking at a map. I'd rather not have to count hexes/squares from point A to point B to know relatively how far it is compared to B and C. The problem is that looking at a square-based map, two points can be up to 40% different in apparent distance yet still have the same movement amount. That's disturbing, to say the least.
The bottom line is that while there's not a massive difference between hexes and squares, historical tabletop gaming has preferred hexes for a very long time. Most such gamers prefer hexes, and 4X games are made up disproportionately of that group of people.
Yes, using a 3-dimensional grid system takes massively more space than a 2-dimensional grid system.
Think of a GalCiv galaxy that is 100 tiles long in each dimension:
In a 2-dimensional system: 100 x 100 = 10K tiles
In a 3-dimensional system: 100 x 100 x 100 = 1M tiles
Besides from that, try playing Star Ruler or Sword of the Stars 2. (They're using 3D galaxies)
The problem is that you constantly need to rotate the camera in order to see the distance from a solar system to another in every angle to determine the distance between them.
So even though 3-dimensional galaxy maps may sound really cool and realistic, they are very impracticable in a game.
I think this is a case of: if it ain't broke, why fix it?
A better question is, why change from squares? They've worked fine since GalCiv1.
Thanks for the info Rulestormer; wasn't quite thinking that big though, maybe 100x50x20 perhaps or probably in widescreen format more like say 160x90x20 [the latter a mere 288,000 tiles, although I do see the problem for programming where such a grid would be a contiguous array of 20 arrays that were 160x90-arrays whereas any 2-d map would just be One 160x90 array or 14,400 tiles].
However we all have our preferences, and while I am used to the Square Tile Format [that was always Diamond shaped] and in disliking change, would prefer to retain them. If there has to be change my vote would go to 3-d Cubes irreversibly. Otherwise who cares about distances and the mathematical mumbo-jumbo ? It just looks weird traveling in wiggly lines with Hexes when it doesn't happen with diamond shaped Tiles [although, to be fair, CIV-5 has managed to fix this by showing travel as an Arc, presumably Stardock have the same or better programming abilities].
I might get around to trying "Star Ruler" or "Sword O The Stars 2" sometime to see if I still like the idea, except I imagine they're RTS's rather than TBS's, but in the meantime I want Cubes, okay.
And while I agree with you Charon2112 on why should we change when the "if it's not broke" rule should apply. I suppose that because Stardock's leading competitor, Firaxis, did it with CIV-5, then it's the new standard for all 4X-games. I just hope they don't similarly impose a 1-unit per tile/hex rigidity [that really didn't need hexes to work]. But then again because the GC-series has always had Fleets, I maybe shouldn't worry.
The coordinate system we use for our world is neither squares or hexes, and is not comparable to either. Squares and hexes are flat (2 dimensional) and will not work on a sphere.
This is another vote for hexes. Hexes worked great for me in table top strategy games long before there were computer strategy games. I always wondered why they become squares on computers. As someone said above, "Why change what isn't broken?"
As far as I am concerned, they changed it to squares to accommodate lazy programmers. I am so glad that gaming is finally un-fixing what was never broken by returning to hexes.
You may consider this a firmly held subjective opinion if you wish. I certainly consider the preference for squares to be exactly that.
Lol, are all you people serious. The devs will never change back to squares. And it was likely not lazy programmers erischild but just them doing what everyone else was doing and what players liked at the time.
DARCA.
Was Jon Shafer involved in developing GC3? I know he's a big lover of hexes.
True, but then again we are not dealing with planar geometry are we. We are dealing with spherical geometry. The question still remains, why do we utilize a quadrilateral coordinate system vs. a hexagonal coordinate system.
Because in real life, we're not constrained by the coordinate system in terms of movement or placement. You can move anywhere within those squares from coordinate to coordinate so we may as well keep it as simple as possible.
While as in games, the boxes/hexes set the specific point in which you can move.
Sigh.
I was hoping that we'd move beyond the grognards of yesteryear and move into the 21st century.
While this may not be a AAA+ funded game, one would think that we would see the money we're investing in it . . . better graphics, smooth animations, and most certainly NO SHIPS DOING THE SNAKY SNAKE DANCE!
Hexes limit movement to six directions. Grids allow movement in all 8 cardinal directions.
My other beef is Starports. The fact that they are separate from the planet itself on a map that bears no actual relation to distance, in my mind is pretty stupid. There are all sorts of questions that beg why this choice has been made, not the least of which is no one would build a starport anywhere but in orbit, and the L5 points in a system would be too near a planet to represent on a completely different hex/square.
Why go this route at all?
(My topic, I can wander, can't I? )
Captain Tolan Grimm
Even if you have fixed movements to center points, which method would one use in reality?
In the guise of keeping things simple, which one is simpler to deal with in the game, a hexagon tiled map or a square tiled map? I for one make more tactical errors when it comes to a square maps because there are 8 directions of attack and not the 4 that is plain to see. While on a hex map I find it easier to deal with things tactically. (I'm not saying I'm great at tactics and strategy in general, just that I make less errors with hex maps).
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