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World Shape and Size

Once you've decided whether the area is to be part of a planet or not, you can address the question of size and shape. You have two choices for shape: hexagon and cylinder. (See the players chapter for pictures of these.) The important thing for you as a designer is that the cylinder wraps around, while the hexagon is bounded on all sides. One consequence is that games involving pursuit will be quite different; on a cylinder, the chase can go 'round and 'round forever, while on a hexagon, a fleeing unit could be cornered. Cylinders have a disadvantage in that there is no obvious "starting place" for coordinates, scrolling, etc, so there is a navigation and orientation problem for players, especially if the world is randomly generated and not the familiar continents of the Earth. In fact, players will often not even realize that a world is a cylinder and will assume that the edge of the display is the edge of the world! To make a cylindrical area, set the circumference of the world equal to the width of the area. Otherwise, the area will be handled as a hexagon.

You can choose either to set a fixed size using the area form, or allow players to set the actual size via the world-size variant, in which case you can define the allowable range of sizes.

Worlds need not be really large. Larger worlds are harder for players to manage, they take longer to display, and can consume prodigious amounts of memory (since they are represented as arrays internally, for speed). The ideal range of sizes depends primarily on the size and speed of units. A 60x60 area in a game with units whose speed is 1 means that they will take 60 turns to cross, while units with a speed of 20 take only 3 turns, so they make the world "feel smaller". As another example, in the standard game, a 20x20 area allows player to come to grips quickly, but it also means that each player's units might be within attack range right from the outset, which has a drastic effect on strategy. For exploration-oriented games, larger worlds are more interesting.


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