This thread is for debating the following:
1. Map size, shape
2. Weather
3. Terrain types, modelling
4. Terraforming options and methods
.
.
.

You get the idea. Have fun.

A-I-a. (Reasons for 3D globe)

Sending explorers to reach both poles could be an achievement. Maybe its a prerequisite for discovering 'Refrigeration' or somesuch and the first Civ to reach the poles could get it free. Course unit attrition would have to be taken into consideration ... it should, anyway -- even in modern times, military units have often been wiped out by arctic cold, decimated by diseases in jungles, lost at sea to storms.

Ummm I noticed terrain elevation, though I know it was discussed, was not added to the summary.

Here are some reasons for terrain elevation:

* Consideration for a realistic sight limit (no ground unit should be able to see through mountains, even spies). Hiding in the mountains is a common tactic thus far not dealt with realistically in Civ.

* Makes global warming/cooling more accurately modeled by adjusting the sea level (as the ice caps freeze/melt). As many major cities throughout the world are on coastlines, this would add to the real significanct threat of global warming.

I do not think eleveation should be included as in smac. THere is too much variation in elevation in a 200 km square to be reperesented by one value. It also makes the whole map look like a chunk of small mountain range...

Oh, bugger. The HTML is off. Grrr... Well, anyway.
../../Forum28/HTML/000128.html

(Crikey, the HTML isn't off after all...)

I don't understand what you mean by "torus, does not work" and a separate section for "torus/cylindrical". The "con" for a torus shaped world is that it isn't even close to realistic, makes it difficult to visualize, and in general is pretty goofy (granted that last one is pure opinion...).

Another con of the "underground terrain" (presumably on a separate "underground" map, similar to the alternate plane in Master of Magic?) is that it is difficult to visualize both maps simultaneously. You would probably need to swap between the two views quite often, which could become quite tedious.

What does "icy water" do?

I don't know what that person said when Torus maps do not work but somebody claimed it was horrible to play so I wrote what he/she said. Torus/cylindrical means it's a combination, rectangular map but wrap around on all edges

Underground terrain con - i'll add that...

icy water - a suggestion, don't remember where I found it while I was going throug hthe general forum, difficult for ships to navigate, icebergs and such I presume

I don't see how that's a combination, and not just a "torus" on it's own, but not really a major point... The "doesn't work" comment makes it sound like it's a physical impossibility, but your comment here makes it sound like it just wouldn't be fun (or something to that effect). Maybe you could reword it so it's less confusing?

"Bridges ... There is a really long thread on this in the CivIII general forum"

Pro:
Space exploitation and warfare can be accurately simulated.
It is logical that the solar system is colonized before Alpha Centauri.

* Unrealistically large arctic areas. I can and have built successful cities, the computer almost never finds them. Can build a lot of airfields too that would be difficult to find, because the arctic strips in Civ and Civ2 are unrealistic.

While a Torus map would be extremely silly, a cyndrilical map with pole-teleporting (basically what I think you guys refer to as a torus) isn't. In other words, when I reach that strip of pole, it's like I'm standing in every other square. I automatically see the other pole squares, and in one move I can move to any of the other ones, even if it's across the world.

Making an AI that can cope with that might be dificult, though.

Elevation: I agree that SMAC ended up looking like a small part of a mountain range. I suggest the same model is used, however, except that the mountains should not poke up nearly as much. I don't want flattened terrain, but the problem in SMAC was that only the most gentle slope upward was supported- Japan is mountanious and next to an ocean, for instance, it the mountains just rise very fast at a high slope. If the neccesity of having 1000 m slopes upward is destroyed, then we're set.

I agree that bridges are unrealistic. However, canals are not. A nice canal modelling system should be put in place around the 1800's, and you should be able to allow who goes through, who goes to the front of the line, and how much of a toll you have to pay to go through (if any). A ship moving into a canal should lose 4 moves. If two ships move in at the same time, the more-favored ship loses 4 moves, and less favored ships wait in line and lose 6 moves. The loss is carried over to the next turn. So a 6-point moving cruiser who uses up 3 movement points getting to the canal only has 5 points the next turn, or 3 points it it was a nation friendly enough to use the canal but was pre-empted by a ship owned by the canal owner, who got to go first.

Offshore Sensor Station - I am sorely lacking reconnosance information of the marine squares in my SMAC games!

Call it SOSUS, after the giant sonar nets that spanned Greenland-Iceland-UK during the Cold War so that Soviet submarines/anything couldn't get past it undetected.

The main problem with that is that if a Soviet sub was bold enough to wander through the nets over into the Atlantic, he'd be followed by one or two American/British subs to make sure he wasn't up to anything sneaky. In Civ games, he'd just wander through, you'd see him when he crossed the square with the nets, and not much else. Tracking someone is most difficult when they basically teleport a small sea away every turn.

Still, if you did it that way, the nets would be laid down starting from the shore (nets not connected to the shore are useless) over to either another shore, or they'd double back on themselves. They'd detect any ships passing over their area; plus, unless enemy satelites or planes actually watch you lay them down, they aren't seen by enemy ships until it's too late and they're detected. Ships defending after being detected would face a penalty when defending themselves. Of course, a ship can try and destroy the nets (if it's wartime).

Resource Relay Center - Expands the radius of a city.

Nope, makes things too complex. Go with a cariation on the supply crawler made- the suburb or small town connected to the city that transmits resources. Otherwise the placement of cities gets too complex.

-Research Centres

Research is NOT done in the country. Well, maybe biology is, some of it, but the great majority of your thinkers are in the city- philosophers to be with people and the government, economists because that's where the trade is, psychologists because that's where the people to treat are, and physicists because that's where the government built the nuclear lab.

-Military Bunkers (like StarCraft)

I didn't play StarCraft, but what I know from them, they're exactly like Forts in that you can stick marines in them for better defense and firepower.

By the way, I prefer the term Fort- it's more realistic for the scale of the map. One lousy bunker?

-Nuclear Missile Silos (as if they'd be in cities)

but if not, the map should be hexagonal. Squares just make for unrealistic corner-hopping movement. There are no corners to hop on a hex map, every side and "angle" is just a border to another full hex.

Like this:
__/8 \__
/7 \__/9 \
\__/. \__/
/1 \__/3 \
\__/2 \__/
\__/

(I shudder to think what this will look like outside the fixed-width box ... copy that jibberish into Notepad to see the layout)

This makes radii (city radii, radii of visibility, etc.) a lot less clunky in addition to makeing movement more realistic.

code:

---

    __
 __/8 \__
/7 \__/9 \
\__/. \__/
/1 \__/3 \
\__/2 \__/
   \__/

---

I see two problems with a Hexagonal Pattern:

(1) Neither Squares nor Hexagons fit across a sphere correctly without distortion. To do it without any distortion would require a geodesic dome (soccer ball) pattern of hexagons and pentagons, and even that has a limit.

(2) The movement might be more "logical", but I still say it's harder to map onto the numeric keypad.

code:

---

        8
 7    _____    9
     /     \
    /       \
    \       /
     \_____/ 
  1           3
        2

---

The effects of this features may vary, but could be an effective defence, as it slows an attacking army.

I think only SAM, airfileds, airports and carriers/AGIES crusiers should be able to get information on space units.

For looking at the entire sphere map: there's got to be possible to program a way to project a spherical map onto a flat, overview map.

To help with the tediousness or the inability to see everything if map layers are implemented, how about an option to make translucent layers?

Arguments for hexes:

1. Easier to judge distances. It's a lot easier if all movement is in straight lines than diagonally over the corner of a square.

2. Easer to fit. An area of hexes can always be a hexagon, and thus things like city limits won't be of any bother to figure out.

3. "Natural" movement. Movement in every direction is Actually the same distance where as on a square grid the diagonal movement is much longer.

Arguments for squares:

1. Tradition. Civ games have always had squares, and the whole resource system would have to be reworked to fit hexes.

2. Easier to put into perspective. This might seem like a small point, but it's vitally important for customisation. I completely fail to imagine a 45 degree tilted hexagon, or even a hexagonical texture.

3. Less conjunctions. Drawing four sides is easier than drawing six.

4. No social stigma attached. Hexes ring unpleasantly of "anorak" and "wargame".

5. "natural" for screen, textures, graphics.

6. Easy Customisation. See EnochFs post below.

Arguments against both:

1. Neither will map correctly onto a sphere...

------------------
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die."
-Mel Brooks

Let me be a lone voice against the sphere map. I think it would:
1) be confusing to use
2) take a fairly powerful computer
3) slow down development and release
4) make it impossible to see the whole world at once without also having a flat map
5) Also, only the north pole has any real significance, and it is only significant for a few fairly recent military applications.

n.c.: You're not the only one against a sphere map .

Hexes: Another con is that you have to move in a zig-zag to achieve movement in one of the N-S or E-W directions (depending on how the map grid is oriented). Moving in one of the cardinal directions is quite common, and the zig-zag effect can be frustrating.

If Paint Shop Pro or any other major graphics editor had a way to cut and paste hexagons, I'd have no problem. But cutting and pasting is limited to squares and rectangles, meaning for every cut-and-paste, you'll be overlapping the edges of the hex, and you'll have to re-draw those edges manually. And unless the hexes are placed sufficiently far apart, you might have to re-draw part of another unit.

I honestly don't know what it is you don't get about this argument... do you paint your units manually? If you simply re-draw the graphics, then there will be no inherent problems in the hex layout for the graphics files. I know a lot of people draw their own graphics. I've seen their scenarios. Their graphics are horrid.

A major obstacle to a spherical projection and to hexes is that they're different. Being different is a risk from the developer's & marketeer's view -- you have to have a good reason to be different. Being too different becomes immediate obstacle for players starting out and just being different for the sake of being different isn't enough. So far, in all the arguments I've not heard something that would make me, if I'm the Firaxis decision maker, to take the risk and go with something different. I'm not saying there is no such reason, I'm just saying that I have not heard one that would sounds like it will help me sell more games by making it enough more fun to play and more appealing in the marketplace. Personal opinion obviously but that's my view at the moment.

What is important to me, and would add to my enjoyment of the game would be:

-- Map generation code that makes rational, geologically reasonable maps. Civ2 (and most others) map generation routines suffer from too little realism and too much random terrrain. Compare the Earth 'canned' maps to anything that the map generator will produce. Desert just doesn't occur in little 1-2 square patches all over the map for instance. Mountains should generally occur in chains defining a plate boundary. Most mountain chains will form boundaries between terrain types--forest on one side, plains on the other; desert on one side and jungle on the other. Sure exceptions exist in the real world and some randomness should be present, but not to the degree currently present. The Civ2/Colonization/etc. map routines also seem incapable of producing really large continents that don't snake and twist all over the map. Sure, that should be one result, but all the time?

-- Dynamic maps in the game with associated player-controlled parameters for scenario building game replay purposes. By that I mean mainly evolution in climate - whole planet shifts to wetter, drier, warmer, colder, gradual change over hundreds of years. Might want to consider a few other types of changes like growing/shrinking areas of forest or desert, an occasional volcano popping up, etc.

-- The ability to name map features as part of the map creation process in scenario building and create names for features during game play.

(portions of this are a repeat from the customization thread since there is overlap with that topic)

The second type would be "light" radiated ground. These would be created at ground zero and in some ajoining squares by primitive, WWII style nukes dropped from bombers (rather than missiles); in all ajoining squares that don't have heavy radiation by modern nukes, and some squares 2 squares away; and in all squares two squares away from a futuristic nuke. These would heal naturally after 50 years, or when a settler moves in to clean it up. They don't turn into desert, but rather revert to their previous terrain after being cleaned up. Production is one-quarter in these areas when not cleaned up, and unequipped units take 10% damage per turn when in them. Cities that were nuked and now stand on weakly radiated ground take a -1 in growth.

Also, since map-affecting effects like global warming are probably covered here as well, make sure CivIII distinguises between nuclear pollution and normal pollution. Normal pollution causes the global warming we all know and love, Nuclear pollution causes a nuclear winter.

"n.c.: Separation of settler and engineer should not occur until late game"

Actually, my thought is to have completely separate colonizer and improver/engineer units for the entire game. Only the former would reduce population and would not take much to build. I think someone did have an idea similar to this and I responded, so the fault (if any) is probably mine for not being clear.