Map

Earth is a sphere (ish) and for realism so should be the game's map. It is impossible to map equally sized square or hexagonal tiles onto a sphere. There are several alternatives:

• • Truncated icosahedron derivative (pentagons and hexagons) (e.g. https://sourceforge.net/projects/hexmapsphere/)

  • Geodesic sphere of equilateral triangles

  • Irregular shaped tiles (e.g. Voronoi grid)

Largest Xconq map is 800x320, 256,000 tiles

Geodesic sphere

Perhaps the best method is a geodesic sphere of equilateral triangles. The basic shape is a 20-sided regular icosahedron:

Each face of a regular icosahedron is an equilateral triangle, which can be infinitely subdivided as follows:

Below is an image of how a triangle-based spherical map might look:

Irregular tiles

Pros

• • Can more accurately represent country shapes

Cons

• • More difficult for AI (I would expect)

Rectangular grid uneven tile size in game

Another way to address the spherical map problem would be to display to the player a rectangular grid (with wrap on the East/West edges), but to have the tile distances modelled differently within the game dependent on latitude. So a unit that can move 1 tile per turn at the equator can move 6 tiles per turn at 5o. Likewise, the resource production of a tile at the equator is 36 times more than a tile at 5o.

Historic looking maps

To add to the feel of the game, it would be interesting to use historic-looking maps to display the world to the human play. These would be geographically inaccurate (and incomplete) but the accuracy would improve through the course of the game (with technological development). The world would become a sphere once the civilisation has discovered that the world is spherical.

Number of tiles required to model navigable rivers

The River Thames is navigable by ocean going vessels up to Tower Bridge, where the river is approximately 250m wide. Using this figure as a guide, and assuming square tiles, this gives a tile area of 0.06km². The surface area of the Earth is 510,072,000km². This would suggest that 8,161,152,000 tiles would be needed, approximately 30,000 times as many as the largest Xconq map.

Voronoi spheres

Relevant links:

https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/

http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation (there's an online generator which is just amazing)

http://blog.pocketstarship.com/2013/10/upon-voronoi-sphere.html

https://whenitsdone.org/2014/07/29/map-generation-on-spherical-planet-part-i/

Representing units on the map

• • Sprites

  • Icons

  • Flag

  • Just a number to indicate strength