I'll concede that 8 directions of travel is better than 6 directions of travel, but that is pretty much the only advantage squares have. There are other reasons that hexes are the defacto standard for war gaming. They don't keep it around for nostalgia purposes. Firaxis is trying to add more legitimacy to the serious.
The distance travelled by a unit is constant on a hex map regardless of which direction they travel. On a square map, the units travel further on a diagonal move.Like what?
The distance travelled by a unit is constant on a hex map regardless of which direction they travel. On a square map, the units travel further on a diagonal move.
Moving diagonal relative to a hexagon is still longer too, its just a different angle than a square
I was happy with the gameplay of Civ 5 for the most part. The two things I'd really like to see addressed are tech victory / tech tree progression (tech victory is too easily 'independently' achieved and I think I'd like to see more 'branches' in it) and multiplayer performance/stability. If they can improve just that much I'd call it a win.
Yah but what matters are the squares themselves not the actual distance from edge to edge.
In other words, we respect your opinion but anecdotal evidence shows that square isn't optimal.
All I see is a meaningless element considering in games with grids movement is usually based off squares or hexes instead of measured distance.
What's a "diagonal" move on a hex grid? If you're moving in any of the six possible directions, the distances travelled is the same. (Given a unit hexagon, the distance travelled is sqrt(3).
I was excited until I read that it uses the Civ 5 engine with one unit per tile limitation. Pass.
The problem with Civ5 isn't so much that OUPT it is inherently bad. The problem is that the design team simply implemented OUPT because "noobies don't like stacks of doom", not because it made any kind of sense as a gameplay mechanic in the context of Civilization. This key design failure is the reason why most of the rest of Civ5's gameplay mechanics fall apart - every gameplay change thereafter was simply implemented post-hoc to try to clean up the mess made by shoehorning in OUPT where it didn't belong.
So is there any consideration from you guys for real time with pause in Civilization comparable to Total War with deployments, movement, tactics, and logistics?
I like the one unit per tile setup far better than stacks.
It adds strategy, because you need to plan out how you are going to attack a city instead of just moving all units into one square; things like attacks over water become important when you can't stack all attackers in another square. Movement is also more strategic, as is placement for keeping important units alive that otherwise would be 'hidden' in a stack from ranged.
It sounds like you want more of a wargame and less of a empire game. You should check out Europa Universalis IV. It doesn't have the real time combat of TW, but it does has the pausable, real time system you like.
This goes to the noob part of my comment. If you ever played Civ4 at an appropriate difficulty level, you would know you very much have to plan how and where you are going to attack. Cities are often on hills or along rivers because of the gameplay bonuses they provide. They also give defensive bonuses such as river-crossing penalty or hill penalty which means you have to chose where to attack from. With the rock-paper-scissors mechanic and defensive bonuses mechanics, you have to carefully chose what units to have in the stack and which ones to attack with one-by-one in order to secure victory with minimal losses.
Why do you speak about this as though the exact same mechanics and thought don't exist in Civ5? You could make the argument that it requires more planning because you can't simply put everything on the one optimal attacking tile and the spatial restrictions mean you may need to better utilize and organize units that can attack at range or move and attack in single turn to maximize your effectiveness. And all while trying to not hinder your own troop movements or inadvertently leave one vulnerable to ensure that you have melee forces in place to finally take the city.
Why do you speak about this as though the exact same mechanics and thought don't exist in Civ5? You could make the argument that it requires more planning because you can't simply put everything on the one optimal attacking tile and the spatial restrictions mean you may need to better utilize and organize units that can attack at range or move and attack in single turn to maximize your effectiveness. And all while trying to not hinder your own troop movements or inadvertently leave one vulnerable to ensure that you have melee forces in place to finally take the city.
And if they made the game right then bombardment from siege weapons would damage all units in the tile so the mechanic of multiple units per tile would have in some ways more thought and planning than one unit per tile mechanics. This is the problem that these mechanics that are being preached are constantly referred to as superior in every way. One might consider that there are not good and bad mechanics but differing mechanics.
I think OUPT was implimented because of lazy math. In hardcore strategy games like Hearts of Iron or War in the Pacific, groups of mixed units are pitted against each other simulataneous using all sorts of variables that can affect the outcome of a battle. The Civ I-IV "stack of doom" was inheriently flawed because combat for each unit would occur successively and with relatively simplistic math. When they switched from stacks to single units, they made the mistake of not redefiniing combat units to focus on their purpose. A real army is comprised of multiple types of units (the stack of doom being a over-simplified version) that work together for a certain purpose and you lose a bit of that with OUPT. I do actually prefer OUPT, but the current implimentation is weak.
In hardcore strategy there is a concept called "frontage" that limits your ability to stack units ad nauseum. There is only so much geographic space in front of a unit, therefore there is a physical limit to the amount of troops and/or hardware you can attack with at any given time. OUPT deals with this, except in the case of Civ V the tiles are too big and it dumbs down actual strategy. My opinion is that they should split the exist tile size into 4 pieces and keep OUPT. In the place of one current tile, you would have space for four units, such as one armored, one mech inf, one artillary, and one support or whatever mix you want. Choosing how to mix my units would be so much more satisfying than what we have now.
This idea, I like. If I had to pick between OUPT and stacks, I would choose OUPT. But a compromise like this I can get behind. One of the troubles I have is having my artillery sieging a city and then trying to push frontline troops up past them. They should at least let you move troops through each other if they don't end their turn on the same tile.