Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps 142
bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Informative)
From a computational chemist point of view, who uses both square and hexagonal lattice all the time, it isn't that difficult/strange actually. Thanks to the fact that periodic boundaries are used, it will just be a 'simple' conversion. The main issue one might encounter though is the fact that you'll go from 8 neighbours to 6 neighbours (if I am not mistaken the diagonals are also counted as neighbours in Civ4..., otherwise it's 4 to 6).
Plus I believe they actually wanted to limit the diagonal travelling, so it makes sense to prevent the diagonal 4x4, instead of encouraging it.
No, I am not worried about the conversion of the lattice/map. What I am worried about is the fact that in Civ5 it won't be possible to have more than 1! army per tile. So what will happen to the other dozen armies that were on the converted tile?
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Informative)
Civ 4 map plots are squares. Civ 5 are hexagons. I don't see an easy conversion process that won't produce real not-just-semantic map differences
Someone at reddit posted a diagram of how to do this fairly easily: http://i.imgur.com/lpJRd.png [imgur.com]
The only problem is with moving resources out of city limits, etc... things which may or may not be practical problems.
Square to hexagon conversion is easy (Score:2, Informative)
A hex grid can be thought of as a square grid with every second line shifted by 0.5 * squareWidth on the X axis, so the conversion can be rather straightforward. But yes, it will produce semantic map differences as some squares that were previously diagonally adjacent to each other no longer will be after conversion.
Re:DRM (Score:4, Informative)
The only "DRM" is that it's a Steam-only game, and you can always play steam games in offline mode.
Re:DRM (Score:3, Informative)
Your description of how steam works doesnt jive with how steam works.
Re:Rumours (Score:3, Informative)
The Phalangs will successfully defend against Warships.
So what's different than previous versions?
Re:Wow (Score:2, Informative)
You're right though... there is no "intimidation" victory mode. Sounds like a hybrid between conquest and diplomacy, which is the way most games go.
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:4, Informative)
No, you're right. The very concept of using a hexagonal grid would have been far beyond the computing power of any such system. To even begin to display a hex map like this requires at least a 3.0 GHz, quad-core processor and a DX11 video card with a minimum of 512M DDR3.
Or, of course, you could have just played Sword of Aragon [mobygames.com], Battle Isle [mobygames.com], Conflict: Middle East [mobygames.com], or just about any other authentic computer wargame from that era. You could even have played Advanced Squad Leader back in 1985, which despite being a board game still has more lines of code in the rulebooks than most computer games.
Hexes are nothing new, and they're not complicated.