Re: Time beats phases-and-points

Jay Gischer (gischer@puget.mti.sgi.com)
Mon, 26 Sep 94 22:34:40 -0700

Patrick McLaughlin writes:
> On Mon, 26 Sep 1994, Rich Skrenta wrote:
>
> > > HOWEVER, I do wish you;d allow diagonal movement, and make it cost
> > > say 1.5 times as much as an orthogonal move. It's a decent approximation,
> > > and makes moving faster so you can do more stuff in a month, and
> > > is more realistic to boot. Is there some reason why this is not done?
> >
> > Hmmm, no. Should I allow this?
>
> Yes, please. It's one of the oldest offenses against realism in
> orthographic games maps, and is one of the reasons that hex maps became
> so popular. This does fix it, enough. BUT, it also introduces half
> days... now if that's the only place that half days appear, then I'd
> suggest that you treat this as two days for the first diagonal move, 1
> for the second.... That way, it keeps people in synch with the normal
> time frame. But, I suppose that you'd have to figure out just how to
> rate the relative time of entry into the province for priority reasons.
>
I'm in favor of it as well, but I note that since the square root of 2
is more like 1.4 than 1.5, we can come up with whole number day times
that work out well, and not bother with half days.

to orthogonal diagonal
plains 7 10 (from 9.8)
forest, etc 8 11 (from 11.2)
mountain 10 14 (from 14.1
ocean 3 4 (from 4.2) This is the worst.

But, for the icing on the cake: DON'T allow diagonal movement between
land/ocean or port city/ocean. I think this can be easily justified,
and will get rid of the infamous "coastal crawl".

-j

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