CUBE MAP
(The cube folds up to be flat from the perspective of the centre

+ squares can be used
+ the isometric view of Civ 2 can be used
+ includes the polar regions

1) A simple, tile-based system which covers the sphere with regularly sized polygons.

Pros: Movement is easy, city radii are well defined, textures are relatively easy to make (although pentagons would be confusing on most of those counts).

Cons: The largest possible solid with all identical sides is the icosahedron, with 20. This is mathematical fact. A large Civ 2 world can have 10,000 squares. Point made.

2)You can further approximate a sphere by geodesating into triangles.

Pros: You can have more than 20 tiles.

Cons: Triangles are, of course, a nightmare. Since the geometry is not constant, each will have either four or five triangles adjacent across each corner. Movement on such a map would be very confusing, and the nonconstant number of diagonal squares would mess up the city radius. Also, for a large number of triangles, the sizes vary greatly. (triangle on what would have been the edges of the original shape are smaller than those in the middle.) Texture mapping becomes more difficult because the tiles aren't all the same shape. Bad choice.

3) Geodesating can also used mixed Hexagons and pentagons (essestially, if you chop off all the corners in the triangle-based solid).

Pros: Hexagons and pentagons are slightly more tractable than triangles; there are no diagonal sguares, as mentioned before.

Cons: Everything else mentioned about triangles.

4) Throw out tiles. There would still have to be some sort on underlying polygonal structure, of course, but it could be ignored for the purposes of gameplay.

Pros: Some people want to do this anyways. It frees units to move in any direction and any distance, makes City radii more realistic (and variable; the city radius could grow a small amount with each additional population point ). It looks pretty.

Cons: Texture mapping is hard for Firaxis/Microprose, and impossible for us, the customizers. Combat gets ugly, as mentioned before. Land improvements become ambiguous. Also, this would be for machines with good 3D cards only. There would be dozens of difficult programming hurdles, especially the map generator. However, it has been done, by Bullfrog in Populus: The Beginning, or whatever it's called. Those are very small worlds, and in an RTS game, so perhaps their methods would be impractical for Civ. I don't actually know how they did their goemetry.

All this said, I WOULD like to see a spherical world. My personal favorite, as you may have guessed, is the tile-less option. This also allows the possibility of multiple world geometries; If we have a tile-less sphere, why not a tile-less cylinder or a tile-less torus, or even the good old square planet? Using spheres, it would also allow neat solar-system visualization if that is implemented. As for global strategy, given that we are already using a good 3D engine, it's not a problem to distort the sphere onto a 2D map with polar distortions, like the world maps we use today.

code:

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    |---|
    | 1 |
    |---|
    |N2 |
|---|-x-|---|
| 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|
    yS6 |
    |---|

---

The n is equal to the north pole, the S to the South Pole. The x is a direction facer.

If I'm in the upper right corner of section 4 and move into 3, the entire map has to redraw to look like-

code:

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    |---|
    | 1 |
    |---|
    |N2 x
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 3 | 4 |
|---|-y-|---|
    |S6 |
    |---|

---

Note that some squares are now turned 90 degrees. This could get weird, and annoying if you start very close to an edge, or worse, a corner. And estimating City radii at corners will be fun too.

Why am I only able to see parts of the world that my units are at?

At a certain point (after the discovery of a technology for example), I should be able to select which civs' maps I want to monitor. For example, if I want to see what's happening in Russia (an ally) and China (an enemy), then I should (esp. after space flight!) I should be able to launch a satellite that will monitor this, at the very least.

If this is too difficult to do on the Civ III game, perhaps it can be offered separately as an expansion pack.

I would also like to see natural harbors as an ocean feature. They have been at least as important as fish and whales. Their effect would be more trade and food.

Finally, let me mention (for the 47th time) that I would like to see a separation between colonizer units and improvers/engineers/terraformers for the ENTIRE game. The former would reduce population and not take very many shields to build. The latter would not reduce population or need food any more than other units.

I combined Elevation and Rockiness into Landform because the scale we are at is much too large for resolution of individual mountains; any elevation we can see is more along the lines of plateaus. It could be used to make the map look neater, and to determine ocean depths, but otherwise seems pointless, since we're not using solar power for most of the game anyways. Instead, use ruggedness, which determines the base mineral content (if such is used) and the suitability for farming. There are 3 levels, Plain, Hill, and Mountain.

Temperature and moisture would both help determine the food output of a square (you can get a LOT more food out of a hot, wet climate than a cold, dry one). The levels would be simple: Hot, Temperate, Cold, and Arid, Moderate, Wet. Temperature and Moisture would also help a lot with

Vegetation

This is what really gives the land the variation that SMAC lacked. The types could be:

nothing/Scrublands
Grass
Forest

The vegetation would be generated from the underlying terrain, for instance, Forests can't grow on a Hot, Arid Mountain, and Nothing couldn't be placed on a Temperate, Moist Plain.

Pros to this type of system:

1)Much more realistic worlds, where the Landforms are generated first (hopefully using some sort of Plate Tectonics thing), then Temperatures based upon latitude and "wind patterns" (hopefully slightly more complex than in SMAC; Make a smooth 2-D Fractal, then take it's gradient, then rotate all vectors 90 degrees. For something more complex, actually try to take the Coriolis force into effect. Lots harder.), then Moisture based upon Landform, Temperature, and Wind Patterns (which could be discarded after the world generation is complete, and have no bearing on the actual game, or could be used to determine climatalogical effects in the late game caused by massive terraforming, pollution, or nuclear war) then place the Vegetation based upon Landform, Moisture, and Temperature.

2) More land types without getting confusing. You can have a forest, forested hills, forested mountains, cold forest, temperate forest, etc. etc.

3)Terraforming, or whatever you want to call it, can be more reasonable. For instance, changing a mountain into anything other than a mountain, especially when we're talking about big mountain RANGES, is ludicrous, regardless of whether or not you have explosives. But cutting down the forest on the mountain is much more reasonable.

4) You could also put it in the ocean, for nice variety there, too. Landforms are Continental Shelf, Offshore Deeps, and Abyssal Trenches. Vegetation is nothing, Coral Reef, or Kelp forest (more nothing in the ocean than on land, though, and Reefs and Kelp would be limited to Continental Shelf). Here, moisture is mostly just a placeholder in case land ever rises up, and Temperature is still used for determining vegetation.

4) If pulled off well, it could make REALLY pretty maps.

Cons:

1)If pulled off badly, it could make maps that are mostly flavorless, as in SMAC. This could (hopefully) be avoided by, rather than putting transparent textures on the landscape, actually have graphics for each combination. A hot, wet forest looks different than a Cold, moderate one, and not just because it has a bigger cloud over it! The cold, moderate forest should be pine trees, and the Hot, wet forest should be jungle. At the same time, there need to be good borders to avoid the cut-and-dried blockiness of CivX maps. Which leads us to...

2) Too many graphics. 3 Landforms*3 Moistures*3 Temperatures*3 Vegetations = 81 possibilities. Not all of those could be generated right off by the terrain generator, but with terraforming/disasters, or at least for the map maker, you'd need graphics for all of them. Then there are the border tiles... That's a lot of work for a customizer! Also, what about for Firaxis? They're getting paid, but still, those borders are a pain in the neck, even if you could figure a way for the computer to generate them.

3)On top of the work involved, the customizers may sacrifice some freedom, although this can largely be saved by using all user-defined special resources on a flat, boring map, as well as allowing redefinition of the terrain parameters.

Addendum: The old terrains from the L/T/M/V system

Ocean: Offshore Deeps/any/any/nothing
Desert: Plain/Hot/Dry/Nothing
Plains: Plain/Temperate/Moderate/Grass
Grassland: Plain/Temperate/Wet/Grass
Forest: Plain/Temperate/Moderate/Forest
Jungle: Plain/Hot/Moist/Forest
Swamp: Plain/Any/Moist/Grass
Hill: Hill/Any/Any/Grass
Mountain: Mountain/Any/Any/Nothing
Tundra: Plain/Cold/Any?/Grass
Arctic: Plain/Cold/Any/Nothing

Since this hasn't been discussed very much, I'd like to bring it up: weather.

Weather in SMAC was a good addition to the traditional model. With the suggestions on terrain modelling and map generation, it sems that weather will play an increasingly significant role. I'd like to open up a discussion on meteorlogical effects that players would like to see simulate and how.

To give an idea how difficult this could be, I'll give the worst case scenario:
3 Landforms*3 Temperature*3 Moistness*3 Vegetation=81 Land terrain types. Add 3 Landform*3 Temperature*3Vegetation=27 Sea terrain types (assuming the moisture over the sea won't appear on the map, because it doesn't really change the square.). So, that's 108 different tiles. That's a lot of work to customize, but people can deal. So, here's for the borders: Assuming we're using the traditional square-grid map, there are 8 adjacent squares. You can ignore half of those for counting purposes (because a mountain to the northwest of a plain is the same as a plain to the southeast of a mountain) so there are 108 center squares*108 squares to the east*108 squares to the northeast*108 squares to the north*108 squares to the northwest*2 squares per border =about 30 billion borders to draw.

Obviously, there would have to be some shortcuts taken, but I'd really like to see the borders drawn rather than just squaring it off or using grassland as the lowest common denominator. For instance, I'd like to see icebergs breaking off the glacier at the coast, and a cliff where a tall mountain plunges into an abyssal trench. On the flipside, there's no need for the forest to break between a forested mountain and a forested plain. Obviously, transparent textures ala SMAC are the easiest way to go, but I don't know how good they'd end up looking. One COULD make the hills, mountains, and plains 3D objects, with textures mapped over them, and REALLY reduce the total number of borders (down to only 459 million! Hah!), but that might just look dumb. You'd end up with weird stretching on the mountains, and they'd be hard to tell apart from the hills anyways (like SMAC with the grid turned off.)
I wish I had some great suggestion to rap this post up with, but I really just don't know... I guess the best thing to do using the LTMV (now it's official; it has an acronym) system is just forget most of the borders and do it like CivX.

Another idea to reduce the numbe of borders is to draw only selective borders. Forest-plains border is not really as necessary as a Mountain-water one.

+-+-+-+
|G|M|M|
+-+-+-+
|G|H|M|
+-+-+-+
|G|F|H|
+-+-+-+

Here I'm using CivX generalizations. G=grassland, M=mountain, H=hill, F=forest. So, I'd like to see, first off, the three mountains form a chain. This doesn't just mean that they ling to their neighbor; I'd like to see them spill over a little into the hill square to connect the two diagonal ones, while getting a little lower to show the hills growing into mountains... After all, in RL hills are parts of a mountain range, too. Likewise, the hills should slope down to the grassland, and the forest, in it's northern and eastern reaches, should be growing up onto the hillsides a little bit.
In other words, the texture for a given square is determined by it's neighbors. ALL it's neighbors. I've simplified that some by saying that a given square only blends to it's NW, N, NE, and E neighbors; the opposite blendings are the to be counted by the square they start in. So the tile depends on 4 of its neighbors, all together. There are 108 possibilities for the terrain type on the tile itself, and 108 possibilities for the terrain in each direction. 108*108*108*108*108=14.7 billion combinations. Now each of these combinations actually has more than 1 tile in it, it has 5 (here is my error; I only said 2) so there are 73.4 billion borders, counting a border as one side/corner of one square. That's how I calculated before, except that I made the one mistake.

Admittedly, this can be simplified. That's just the ideal for a perfect looking map. If, instead, you blend over edges only, (not corners) and make each border dependant on only the two tiles sharing an edge, you get 2 directions*108*108*2 tiles = 46.6 thousand borders, and the question, "What do I do with corners?"

Here's another idea, that I think makes the best look, and also uses fewer tiles than the original estimate: First, use 3D rendered Landforms, so there's only Temperature, Moisture, and Vegetation left on land. That make 27 terrains each on land and sea = 54 tiles. Make each corner dependant on 4 squares . Here they would be:

+-+-+
|1|2|
+-*-+
|3|4|
+-+-+

So 6 squares is 54*54*54*54 = 8.5 million corners. Each corner laps into 4 squares, but you could actually use square tiles centered at the corners, instead of using tiles with extra corner pieces. I amend my previous estimate by a factor of 3,000. But still this is very many tiles. Say that a good graphics designer can do a corner in 10 minutes, and works 8 hour days. Still takes him 500 years to make all those. If a computer could generate the tiles, though, everything would be beautiful. If there's anyone out there smarter than me who knows of or can imagine a way to do this, please tell me.

Here's another issue with the tile numbers. Say each tile is 64x64 pixels, at 24 bit color, my personal favorite. that's 12k per tile. now there are 8.5 million tiles, so that's 99.6 GB of data for the tiles. Oops.

While I'm rambling, this is a point in the favor of a Hex map. (which I'm not particularly for or against in general) In hex, each corner only has 3 tiles, so 54*54*54 = 157,464 tiles = 1.8 GB = 9 years of work for a designer. That's still a WHOLE lot. But the design time at least is becoming reasonable... hire 9 designers and get it done in a year. It may be more manpower than Firaxis has or can afford, though. And it would have to come out on DVD-ROM, and there'd be no way a customizer could do it. Also, loading all the textures would take WAY too much RAM. Maybe in 20 years on the god computers we'll have then...

In the meantime, though, I don't think that such a beautiful border system is a necessary part of the game... It's eye candy and nothing more. The underlying system is what's important to gameplay. If we completely ignored all borders (except coastlines) it wouldn't be a monumental task... 54 texture maps, and the computer CAN generate the 81 sets of 3D wireframes to go underneath.

Actually, I think a swamp by definition has trees... If it's just grass it's a marsh. I don't actually know how to call it different from jungle, unless there's a fourth level of Moisture, Waterlogged. Maybe it's a swamp if it has a River on it, but a Jungle if it doesn't. No, that doesn't make sense, because the Amazon and the Congo have Jungles all over the place around them, and Swamps/Marshes are usually, if not always, slow moving water. Whatever. Doesn't need to be called either one in the game, just Hot, Wet, Forested Plain.

MAP/TERRAIN/TERRAFORMING 2: Co-Managed by EnochF & eNo