I'd be happy with tetragons as a middle ground.

Well, not in Elemental. Neither units nor armies have a ZOC there.

That's actually one of the main problems of tactical (and strategical) army stuffs. The shallowness of the system...

Loved it, thx.

Re-commenting not working commented code is sth I do, too ... with my own code.

"I must have thought something about not deleting this ... can't remember what, now. Let's not delete it now ... "

No. I was not referring to Elemental. I know that Elemental does not use zoc for armies. But the first addon will focus on tactical combat. Have to search for the link... I think Frogboy mentioned it somewhere.

Gazz, you're right it's important stuff escpecially because it's all about creating yours and bashing other armies. I saw your thread of suggestions but couldn't accomplish reading all of it.

EDIT: Just read some of your thread from September about Movement restrictions and unit Zone Of Control

ZOC in its traditional sense does provide some opportunities to inject strategy into a game. Elemental does not currently use ZOC in that sense but it might some day. Its good to have ways beyond direct damage to manipulate your opponent. I also prefer 'Sphere of Influence'. 'Flatulence Spread Matrix' seems too faction specific.

I dunno, I kinda liked the shuriken shaped ZOC.

Nice & well detailed journal entry. Thanks, Cari!

Squares are easy as well. Just apply the Pythagorean Theorem, and you get a distance multiplier of 1.4 from corner to far corner. Of course, its not as "easy" to count 1.4, 2.8, 3.2, 4.6 as it is to count 1,2,3,4, but it is still no herculean effort.

The main problem was when you'd get to the edge of your influence, and build an improvement there, it wouldn't increase the ZOC.  I could have just made it so that all sources had a radius of at least 2, but I'd rather have What-you-see-is-what-you-get so that the data matches what you can see visibly.  

It would be cool if we made influence a bigger part of the game.  I used to love to "Culture flip

No, not intentionally.  I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't duplicating bad code.  I took them out entirely once I got the points to where I wanted them.  The only reason I ever leave un-working code in comments is if it partially worked and maybe could just use some tweaking, but I always try to leave comments about why that code is commented out. 

Not sure if it will help city spamming, but it will make it easier for you to get to resources that are just outside your influence lines.

But you can't do that, really. Something with a range of 1 when going along a diagonal has a range of 1.4, etc. It's worse with movement because stuff doesn't move the same speed depending on direction, whereas with hexes you avoid the problem.

Squares suck, but we're stuck with them.

With hexes you just get different problems - mainly with graphical content.

Fake angles only work in a fixed isometrical view, not with a mobile camera, and without them your cities look more like beehives.

It's really just a tweaked feature that exists in game already.  I don't think that the AI currently tries to expand its influence by building improvements, but since it will include more tiles, it will get some benefit indirectly.

If we're looking at the same tile, it's 3 squares away from the city hub, which has the radius of 2.  The other improvements only have a radius of 1, so the pouch is in the zone, but not the square above it.  Individual improvements can specify different radii in their xml, but the default is 1. I also made it so that different improvements can exude stronger or weaker influence.  Right now, only resource improvements that are not adjacent to a city will "flip" based on the influence, but even that is useful.

1) Even if you build a quarter tile improvement, it claims that tile for the city, so I think it makes sense to have the radius still be based on the whole tile.  I currently have it using the max radius and max power of all the improvements so that you get the maximum benefit of all the improvements on the tile.

2) It will add more than just one tile, depending on how big the radius of the improvement is.  For a radius of 2 tiles, you actually get an additional 12 tiles than you would if using the Euclidean distance.

3) I'd like to do that soon, but making it instant is a lower priority right now.

Yes, now if you build towards a resource, it will extend your influence towards it.  It also makes it so that people have to declare war on you or negotiate a treaty to come into your lands.  Also, if you get into a battle on your lands, your sovereign can escape death and teleport back to the nearest city.  However, if behind enemy borders, he will die.   No new influence related features are planned for 1.1 at the moment, but even just being able to properly extend your borders will be helpful.

No, it still only recalculates influence at the end of a turn.

I hope the AI can take advantage of this new feature. Otherwise it's just a player bonus.

If I have time to play without cheating, I'll make some additional screenshots to show the borders, etc.  The way that the player's influence abilities work is that for every 100%, the radius of all your improvements will increase by 1.  So if you have 200%, your city hub will eventually expand to a radius of 4 tiles, and the improvements will expand to a radius of 3 tiles, unless the improvement def specifies a smaller max ZOC radius.

Grids are still extremely useful for judging relative distances, directions, etc.  Squares aren't so bad since we allow 8 directions of movement rather than just 4 like most games that use square tiles, and more than 6 which hexes give you.  It's also far easier to represent the coordinates mathematically, and easier to store stuff on a per tile basis.  I think that you'd probably have to use some kind of tree instead of a 2x2 array, which adds more overhead.  

I would like to see ZOC graphics after capturing city work more like AoW (just don`t change land image in one turn, maybe some new valuable "faction power" could be good here).

I disagree. Grids are very useful in  highly abstracted turn based games, to provide easy digestible chunks of visual information for players to be able to quickly understand the game concepts and *plan* exact movements and actions based on them.  Hex grids in particular are useful for advanced tactical concepts like directional facing and flanking in a non-real-time environment.  Sure, in a real time game these things can all be calculated behind the scenes as players execute strategy in a "ballpark" fashion, where players can make instant adjustments.  But turn based games aren't about the ballpark. They are based on absolutes that players need to be able to predict, and plan out precisely, on a turn by turn basis.

So no, they don't absolutely *need* grids. But you're still going to need some system in place for players to be able to easily calculate and predict all these abstracted action concepts to the digit, one, two, and three turns in advance, in a chess like fashion. In many cases, the easiest way to do this is with a grid.