I will say that from a game design perspective, I think one thing to consider is the fact that we would serve a slightly different niche than other civ/city simulators. Instead of purely being a game focused on that aspect (if we did, I don’t see why someone would choose to go with Thrive instead of a more dedicated game like Civilization), we are emphasizing the effects of evolution on how a society develops.
Our unique selling point in these stages is: how do different biological tendencies change the way a society acts? So, we would probably be focused on reinforcing the differences between different types of civilizations. For example, a primarily carnivorous society would likely require so much more area for cultivating animal husbandry.
This doesn’t necessarily make me have an answer and I’m not sure how valuable of an insight it is, but I guess it means that we’d probably want to give players a lot of flexibility, and it might inform a decision from the more technically conscious experts here.
And Thrive will as well, society stage starts with placing individual buildings, and by the start of the space stage the player is only managing entire cities with much more abstract controls.
I think for a final discussion it is still way too early to lock in the choice of grid or no grid. But if we are to use a grid, I think we want to definitely go for a hex grid. Needing to swap from square grid to hex grid when moving between the strategy stages, is not going to go well so I say, definitely hex grid all the way if we are to use a grid.
I think also this discussion is a bit jumbled up as both gameplay and technical considerations are mixed together. It’d be much easier to just decide how the gameplay is, and then from there derive what way the world needs to be done for that to be possible. And that isn’t necessary any interesting discussion for anyone not working on the world generation as that’s the only thing that the technical implementation needs to work with.
I think we hit kind of the same point: in the grand scheme of things, how the technical implementation (grid or no grid) is done doesn’t really matter as long as it supports the gameplay we want to have.
For the prototypes I’m not implementing a grid as that would be extra work, that’s right, a grid is harder to make than just allow placing things wherever.
I did manage to find a city builder using a hex plane, its even done on a actual planet as well:
It is interesting that I have seen more of this hex style used in space colony games, I suppose because they focus often on circular buildings for air domes and such.
I am not exactly sure I like how the roads are placed when in larger groups, and it all looks a bit too random. That could be more about that style though. Its still an interesting comparison anyway.
Also, here is another game using a square grid on the local level and a hex grid on the world level:
Here is an example of how things could look using a square tiling. Obviously Sim City 4 is quite old now, but I think it still has merit and it is still on lists of best city builders out there.
This shows off a nice, huge city. I would recommend just skipping around a bit to look. I think that whatever we choose would have to look good at these scales, and I dont think sim city 4 has done a bad job here, especially for its age.
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An interesting note is that Sim City 4 used fully 3d landscapes, it just uses 2d buildings as they decided 3d graphics wasn’t ready at the time.
Worth noting we can always make rectangular stuff with transformations of Hex coordinates. Even in the current game we often convert from Hex coordinates to Cartesian. It’s not absolutely critical we have a square grid for square things depending how we plan to place things.
