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
Well, I mentioned it before. Here, for example, and here (regarding the races). It was also mentioned in the post I linked to here. Plus, it's a classic (though not as good as MoO 2). You'd expect any 4X fan to at least have heard of it. Although, maybe I'm biased. Ascendancy was the first 4X I've ever played.
Yea, I just don't remember anyone saying it was 3D before this. I am actually stunned at this, can it play on a modern PC?
I play Ascendancy on the iPAD, pretty fun game.
3D and battles:
Ascendancy was (is) a great game. Ahead of its time.
I just settle for tactical combat while keeping the other aspects of the game just as they are. And yes you can have both. 3D map I don't care about after all this is a TBS game so 3d is not really needed
We're off topic here, but I will say that I am NOT in favor of a 3d map . . . yet.
I am still in favor of a tactical battle mode, which would add a lot of depth to the game, and I'm in favor of it being optional.
Actually this Topic is about Hexes vrs Squares.
After the last stream, Paul stated he did not like 'cutting' corners', which why we have the zig zag path of our ships on a strait line. When asked if that can be 'fixed' he stated that it would involve cutting corners across paths and it was not something he wanted to do. This goes back to Squares being superior in this case.
Now in Old Gal Civ II i would send my ship anywhere and the line 'appeared' to be straight. I like this much better than the zig zag. Is there no algorithm we can use to smooth out the movement of the ships on the map? I would rather have a shortened distance and smooth path over the way it is now.
The visual problem is likely to stay as long as their are hexes involved. Paul brought up some good points about the difficulties of just eliminating the zig-zag movement. In general, it would probably require that the game ignore hexes except when starting and ending a turn. By the way they defined movement, I don't think they are going to eliminate the zig-zag movement.
I thought they said they were?!?!?
Paul should try to do it and not care about what he wants in this, as we want it gone and that's all that counts.
DARCA.
Here's the problem:
You'll notice that the "smooth line" movement in GC2 is actually almost always a hockey-stick path - one long side followed by a 45 degree turn and a shorter side. Which, actually, while numerically identical to the actual straight line path in terms of squares crossed, can very significantly deviate from the "true" straight line path.
Now, with hexes, it's much easier to approach the true straight line path, but the cost is that the "smooth" movement via hexes (i.e. lots of straight lines hexes, followed by a 60 degree turn, and lots of more straight line hex movement) is now noticeably different in the absolutely number of hexes traveled than the "squiggly line" true path.
The issue here is that if you decide to ignore the actual hexes during the move, how do you:
1. decide which hexes you've actually moved through (which is important for vision and terrain issues)
2. draw some sort of a bezier curve path with minimal inflection points to produce that "smooth" movement
We've been saying "just fix it", but, now that I think about it, it's much harder than I think any of us anticipated. That said, I am of the camp that says "burn the man-hours to find a reasonable solution", because the squiggly movement does detract significantly from the presentation.
But I still prefer hexes to squares.
Hexes really don't do anything for me. I'm not opposed to the idea off hand, but I think it only really adds to games with ranged tactical combat, such as Age of Wonders.For strategic games I actually prefer squares. There's more potential places to move and it also allows me to use the keyboard to play if I want to. Having to use the mouse for movement gets annoying when exploring new areas or areas with fog of war as I want to move my units one space at a time (so I don't, say, run right past an anomaly and have to backtrack because I went too far.)The only thing that's nice about it in GC3 is star systems. The planets and asteroid belts look better when placed around a star with the hex system then with the square system. But that's only a visual upgrade, which doesn't mean anything to me. I think gameplay is always more important then graphics.I'll live with the hex system, but if it was up to me I think that GC3 should be squares, imho.Edit: It would be really cool if they made it so that you could select hexs or squares when starting a match. Then everybody could play the way they want to. Of course that would require a lot more work, especially in the AI department.
No one cares about problems, just results. If alpha people hate it critics and new players will be even harder and some won't buy it, or worse they won't buy the dlc and nag online.
DARCA
Now that it's pretty clear that snakey-snakey movement is here to stay, I am even more certain I want hexes gone.
It's truly a step back. While there may be some absolute advantages to hexes, the zig-zag is just ugly. And I really can't imagine why I would, in 2014, play a space game that zig-zags.
You build this great Starship Creator, with these amazing looking models, and then, when you send them out, they cannot go in a straight line!
Talk about breaking the immersion.
Lets go back to the grid system we had. Hockey Stick mechanics and all.
Captain Tolan T. Grimm, Grand High Poohbah
Old Grognard
Glorigoth
Grimmian Union
I am in the camp that the snakey movement needs to go
i like the hexes though . I would be happy if the path line were snakey to represent the tile the ship is actually in but have the ship move in a straight line then hockey stick to the last tile
a simple yet imperfect fix would be to instead of moving 10 tiles up in a zig-zag move 5 tiles up/left then 5 tiles up right. Same distance same time more exploration less snake
Just want to go on record as someone who absolutely does not mind the zig-zag movement. I barely ever notice it, and when I do it does not bother me enough to detract from my over-all enjoyment of the game. I hope they don't spend development hours on this, as there are so many things that have a much larger impact on the game-play experience.
Well the zig zag does not bother me either. Rather have the zig zag that the squares.
L7 works 4 me!
Just one note here: I was playing GC2 last night, and notices that GC2 has zig-zag movement for small movements (i.e under about 10 squares). The ships do the same wiggle thing, particularly if there are any obstacles (planets/anomolies, etc.) in the way. It got ugly really fast, which indicates that pathfinding in GC2 was hardly a paragon of cleanliness/prettiness.
So let's disabuse ourselves of the idea that movement in GC2 was just all nice and smooth looking, and be a bit more clear-eyed as to how pathfinding/movement in GC3 will be.
Lies
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