Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Suggestion: FreeCiv on a Hex!

[Artur Biesiadowski <abies@xxxxxxxxx>]

> The second suggestion grows naturally out of the first. Each data point
> generated by the triangular fractal can be replaced by a hexagon (well,
> except for the twelve corners of the icosahedron, but there are ways around
> that). There are reasons that a lot of wargames are played on a hex, and it
> certainly would be easier to figure out the radius of influence for each
> city as well as where the optimum places to put several cities together.
> Plus, you can add another tactical feature to battle -- if you attack head
> on, you attack at half strength, attacking from the front sides make your
> attack full strength, attacking from the rear sides add fifty percent to
> your attack, and attacking directly from the rear doubles your attack
> strength (or something similar).

First on rear attack. I doubt if it has any meaning with armies - if
battle takes over year, they have time to turn back :) Remeber about the
scale - it is not a Little Prince planet.

But the hexes are worth thinking of. Main problem is that hexes are not
intuitional(sp?) - every operation/measurement requires special
routines. For example when rectangle of screen has to be repainted,
which hexes should repaint themselves ? You cannot do anything as easy
as with squares - there is a place for great number of bugs. Hex
coordinates are also not obvious - you will have either holes in array
holding data or complicated proximity function.

I don't think that it would be very hard to support hexmap in server -
after all it would be just 2-dim array with strange proximity rules. But
client would require a lot of changes - completly new tile images, new
handling for map display/control - non-trivial compared to square based. 

Said that, I would vote yes, but not this month :) I think that would be
good to get frozen, stable version fully compatible with civ1/2, but
without any excess functionality like variants for everything/scripting
language. And then for 2.0, introduce own features, change map to hex
based etc, etc. 


Artur