[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Idea/suggestion: Different heights

[Mike Kaufman <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 10:34:21PM +0100, Adolf J. Winterer wrote:
> Idea/Suggestion:
> Terrains can have real height characteristics.
> 
> Description:
> Currently the map (world) of FreeCiv is flat. OK,
> with different terrain types (grassland, desert,
> forrest, hills), but these characteristics are
> only "painted" on tiles and internally accounted for
> in certain aspects (e.g. speed of movement of units).
> With "real" heights quite new possibilities would
> enter the game. The line of sight matters, you could
> hide troups behind a hill or behind a forrest or build
> your cities on the flat top of a hill (makes for better
> defense). Hopefully the locations where cities are
> built will be more diverse with that feature. Mountains
> could be natural "buffers" between cities of different
> players/nations.
> 
> Realistic aspect:
> Brings the world of FreeCiv a lot closer to the
> real world. It is no secret that your life can
> be quite hard if you fight uphill. Or that around a
> corner there can wait a big surprise.

the internal accounting already takes care of the "fighting uphill" aspect
since units have much better defense characteristics on hills and
mountains. (Maybe we should increase attack points if attacking from a
hill/mountain to a non-hill/mountain?)

The line-of-sight is interesting, and can perhaps be taken care of with
judicious use of fog-of-war: i.e. if a unit has a vision radius of two, but
a hill is adjacent, then the unit the tile on the far side of the hill
would be fogged despite the the vision range.

> 
> How to do it:
> Each tile needs a new property, the height above the
> sea. Painting of the map to the screen should not be
> much more difficult, because the isometric projection
> of the map is quite good for this kind of display.
> It might be good to rotate the map/view in 90 degrees
> steps to view things that are behind hills (a function
> that is well known to SimCity players).

this is a bit harder than you let on :) what about overhead view? left in
the dust? I think the physics could take care this without needing to
change the view.

anybody who wants to implement a downhill_attack_bonus option, or a
line_of_sight option should go for it.

-mike