Map Generator 3.0 - Please Critique!

[Zeustiak]

@;226869

I might be understanding this wrong, but when standing on one of the poles you should be able to move to any tile surrounding the pole in the same amount of steps. With your new solution you will only be able to move to the tile that is directly opposite of the tile you start from, or am I missing something? This would create strange situations where for instance Canada could reach northeastern Russia through the poles, but not northern Norway. But really, nations having trade routes, sending troops or even scouts through icy poles would be pretty silly in a world like ours, so you could just block them off like iv Civ.

The map will interlock at the wrap so normal movement will apply. You can see the wrap a few posts up.

For most of the game, on a map with standard Earth-like climate, the extreme cold will stop or kill any units that wander into it. By the time you get to the industrial age and are able to actually traverse the poles in a meaningful manner, the shape and exact mechanics of the polar region will be an oddity that I think will be worth the ability to send subs, nukes, planes, and even (eventually) land units over, as well as interactions such as fighting over oil and other pristine resources.

The biggest problem is that the map is a rectangle. Apart from blacking out half the tiles near each of the poles and coming up with all sorts of weird algorithms for the new… whatever shaped world, there basically isn’t a viable solution to tile a sphere with only hexagons. And I don’t intend on using any pentagons.

The options as I see them are:

1. A rectangular map with no polar wrap as you see in most such games.
2. A map with multiple tile shapes that would be hell to program for.
3. A map that basically wraps in an intuitively odd way, with a polar region that looks pretty weird once you do finally get to the point where you can lay eyes on all of it.

I am heavily leaning towards #3 just to have a polar wrap in a genre that hasn’t seen such a thing.

@;226869

However, if you want to simulate alien worlds with ice-free poles you would have to think of something. If I have understood you correctly or not I would in any case urge you to start adding some very basic gameplay soon. To create pawns moving across the world might get you to see benefits of certain approaches that you would not have otherwise, and might even force you to scrap solutions which seemed ideal without pawns. That would suck having to fix later. Just my 2 cents

This isn’t even for alien worlds, but even our own. We are already at the point where the north pole is navigable by ships in the summer. It won’t be long before the whole north pole is open ocean as a normal occurrence. I intend to have options for runaway global warming events that could change the entire strategic picture. The same for global ice ages(giant meteor, supervolcano, mass nuclear war, etc).

Anyway, the map generator is so wide open that you can easily have a generation that does not have icy poles. The lack of polar wrap makes even less sense in an earth that is too hot to have ice caps.

And yeah, I really want to start working on pathfinding soon, but I need to work out a few other things first including fleshing out a new system for wrapping and re-factoring the rest of the generator. I am not at all worried about polar wrap causing any major problems. It will be easy to turn off if I change my mind.