Longturn Forum

If LT37 is going to be a team game, maybe we could try something different. How about this?

We make 3 player teams and several teams could ally and win the game together. Old fashion way by conquering or with the space ship if that's what people want.

All the players and teams could just form those 3 players teams by themselves and tell us who is playing in that team. Team could have names but we can also call them with made up names like we did in LT35. No shared research and no tech trading but we can talk about that.

Maybe Lone Wolf game?
One player to rule them all?

Some random thoughts with brand new ideas:

1. three players control one nation; however, a turn lasts 8 hours (ever played table tennis in pairs? Yeah, the same principle)
2. one player controls three civs, no tech or money or any exchange whatsoever
3. an idea from GT forum: players exchange nations; say everyone leads one nation for 50 turns and then they switch randomly. HOWEVER, scoring is calculated only as the difference of the state between the start and the end of one's rule
4. An addition to #2, but may apply to standard game, too: once you capture a nation's capital, you take over that nation, thus making it possible to control 4 (or more) nations

Hey,

I created a "German States 1871" scenario recently that can easily be downloaded with the modpack installer. There are 24 nations and each nation has 3 cities, with 3 phalanx, 2 workers and 1 horseman. The 3 cities are connected by road and there are two long distance roads via regia and via emperii. Techlevel is 0. The big rivers like Rhein and Elbe are composed of lake tiles and can therefore be navegated. There are 24 nations and we could play with teams of 2 or 3 players or a classic bellum omnium contra omnes without diplomacy.

Ferdi (XYZ)

I would be interested in trying a scenario such as what Sketlux has made, but perhaps as an "Other" game. I think map balance (in terms of growth and production potential) for fairness should be strived for, and the scenario maps lack that feature in my view. That said, I like the idea of zooming in and expanding a portion of the tech tree, featuring new units (i.e., the already created 'ancients' or 'detailed' rulesets from the modpack installer). The balance is hard to achieve and test games would be needed before developing an LT game as such.

I think we should keep the random fractal maps for LT games, but I liked the team and position selection method from LT32.

I would not be interested anything besides a 1:1 player:nation situation, and would not play if a nations were to be passed around to different players other than for normal vacation delegations.

Small static team sizes could be interesting, but n=3 would discourage cooperating with newer players. I like n=4 or 5, depending on sign-ups, but shooting for 5 or more distinct teams.

I'm at a loss as to how to create incentives for alternate win conditions, honestly. For those that want a space race/diplomacy (Atlantic Telegraph) game, perhaps they too could create an "Other" game that requires some more drastic limits to military expansion - say, double military unit upkeep? Otherwise, I like keeping the flagship LT games as large war games with big maps.

Has there been any testing in past games using hexagon tile maps? I've messed around with it on my own, and the map generator appears to only be made for square tile maps, resulting in the hex maps looking a bit elongated in the north-south dimension. If this were to be fixed would there be interest in doing a hex game? Overall I like the idea of hexagonal tiles, as it eliminates the sqrt(2) bonus of moving in a diagonal direction on square tiles.

Drew wrote: resulting in the hex maps looking a bit elongated in the north-south dimension.

Please explain? I have been playing on ISO-HEX topology mostly without problems. Are you saying the map has inadequate dimensions if generated with the HEX flag?

Here is an example, starting from the LT36 ruleset, using a smaller map and setting

set topology="WRAPX|WRAPY|HEX"

And you can view the screenshot here: http://www.rearviewminor.com/hexelongated.png

You can see that the pole, which should be roughly circular, is definitely stretched out north to south, and generally the other landmasses seem stretched this way too.
Are there any other settings (maybe in the map generator) that you use to avoid this stretching?

The problem is not with the generator which actually produces a "roughly circular" pole as you can see on the minimap. What you see in the main map view is how the tileset used (hex2t in this case) represents the generated map. The shape of one tile defines the proportions and in this case

; Basic tile sizes:
normal_tile_width = 40
normal_tile_height = 72

so each tile on the map is 40 pixels wide and 72 pixels high. If you modify the hex2t.tilespec file in your freeciv install folder and change the second row to "normal_tile_height = 40" you will get a circular pole on the main map too. Otherwise the map will look somewhat distorted because the tiles are designed for the 40 x 72 dimensions. So, this is not a solution but an explanation.

You might want to to try adding the ISO in generator parameters and using the isophex tileset. That combination gives a horizontally "elongated" view but it is kind of explainable. The ISO stands for "isometric view" which is a slanted view while the one without the ISO is straight from above. The ISO one should be considered as the vieweing point being somewhere up in the air shouth-east from the map. So, north is in the upper right corner of the map.

I think your suggestions are only changing the view of the tiles, not how the map generator is generating those tiles. I think this may be a better way to illustrate what I am trying to get at:

On a square grid, the rows and columns of the map array might be numbered like this:


On a hex grid, the same array might look something like this:


On the square grid, 5 rows down is the same distance as 5 columns across. However, on the hex grid, 5 rows down is shorter than 5 rows across (down=cos(30)*across). In my example, if you make a roughly circular land mass on the square grid, it will become more of an oval on the hex grid, appearing stretched out east-west or squished north-south. So I think the issue is with how the generator "sees" the distance between tiles when creating land masses. This is the opposite stretching of what I showed in my earlier post, but it's the same general idea.

I plan to look into this more, I just wanted to check if anyone else already had. Now if only I could figure out how to compile freeciv from the source...