Hey Walter. I played a lot with the DOS version of the game that Mark Baldwin worked on (perhaps also a later windows version, although I probably just played the DOS version on Windows). Two things that struck me as "off" at the time were the way calculating the distance when moving units wasn't as consistent or intuitive as it could be when moving diagonally because the board consisted of squares, and that multiple units couldn't be parked in the same place unless they were in a city.
Are these things you'd handle differently today? Are there any games that you think handled this better? A hexagonal board layout seems like it might be a better approach to calculating distance between points, but what about the limit of one unit per one square on the grid?
I love the idea of allowing players to supply a bot to compete against other bots.
A hex grid certainly addresses that problem, but since I was limited to text, squares it was!
The one unit per square comes about because it is very difficult to see a "stack" of units in one location. It also made combat trivial, just move into the opposing force's square. No special commands needed.
This wound up working fine, and I was always reluctant to mess with game rules that worked.
I enjoyed the 4-player flash version of Hex Empire that used a hex grid. User played one team and AI played the other three at various difficulty levels from naive to cutthroat. Was my favorite online game until the recent demise of flash. I would flip through various starting map layouts until I found one I thought one of the three players that didn't go first could win. The first player had a big advantage mostly.
Strategy was always to wipe out the opponent on the near shortest side and then take on the two that started at the opposite longest end of the board. The best games were those that were finely balanced and resulted in a long war of attrition with the outcome influenced a lot by choosing the best micro-level tactics.
Similarly a square-grid works fine with a 3/2 cost for diagonals as long as typical movement is much greater than 1 square per turn (3 squares of movement per turn is the minimum to not significantly privilege lateral vs diagonal), but that also greatly reduces what can be displayed on the screen at a time.
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Hey Walter. I played a lot with the DOS version of the game that Mark Baldwin worked on (perhaps also a later windows version, although I probably just played the DOS version on Windows). Two things that struck me as "off" at the time were the way calculating the distance when moving units wasn't as consistent or intuitive as it could be when moving diagonally because the board consisted of squares, and that multiple units couldn't be parked in the same place unless they were in a city.
Are these things you'd handle differently today? Are there any games that you think handled this better? A hexagonal board layout seems like it might be a better approach to calculating distance between points, but what about the limit of one unit per one square on the grid?
I love the idea of allowing players to supply a bot to compete against other bots.
A hex grid certainly addresses that problem, but since I was limited to text, squares it was!
The one unit per square comes about because it is very difficult to see a "stack" of units in one location. It also made combat trivial, just move into the opposing force's square. No special commands needed.
This wound up working fine, and I was always reluctant to mess with game rules that worked.
I enjoyed the 4-player flash version of Hex Empire that used a hex grid. User played one team and AI played the other three at various difficulty levels from naive to cutthroat. Was my favorite online game until the recent demise of flash. I would flip through various starting map layouts until I found one I thought one of the three players that didn't go first could win. The first player had a big advantage mostly. Strategy was always to wipe out the opponent on the near shortest side and then take on the two that started at the opposite longest end of the board. The best games were those that were finely balanced and resulted in a long war of attrition with the outcome influenced a lot by choosing the best micro-level tactics.
https://jayisgames.com/review/hex-empire.php#walkthrough
FWIW, you can do hex pretty well as:
although unless you're using CJK-width characters, the visual design can be a bit nontrivial.I was also dealing with a 24*80 display. While your idea works, it would cut the size of map that could be displayed in half.
Similarly a square-grid works fine with a 3/2 cost for diagonals as long as typical movement is much greater than 1 square per turn (3 squares of movement per turn is the minimum to not significantly privilege lateral vs diagonal), but that also greatly reduces what can be displayed on the screen at a time.