I think its hard for either the community or the devs to really have a meaningful conversation about either spell or core changes until 1.1 is released. As far as pre 1.1 is concerned, I feel like we have all discussed it at great length and now we are simply waiting to see the changes they made. Personally, I like the idea of changes to ZOC as they have already stated that level 1 cities will not inherently generate influence. I think it will enhance the meaning of city shape, which is a good thing.

Thank you, that was very interesting.

Sadly, i think the greatest problem involved with this topic is that ZOC, no matter how you implement its mechanics, is largely moot in the current build because it has an insignificant gameplay impact. If my ZOC is twice the size or half, rhomboid or mandelbrodian, encompasses 10000 tiles or 100, it really doesn't matter, because the only significant terrain modifiers in the game for which ZOC has a use are shards.

One thing I've seen ZOC do is flip resources between different kingoms/empires.  If an outlying resource of mine ends up in another empire or kingdom's ZOC, it becomes theirs.  And vice versa if I boost my ZOC.

So I think Zone Of Control is the correct terminology in this case.

I actually like what's shown in the last pic.  This gives you another reason to 'push' a city towards another kingdom or empire, in an attempt to push back their zone of control.  Of course, your city is now closer to the border now, and hence more accessable for attack...

Someone posted up about buildings that boost influence in cities, and having these be used to determine the radius of said ZOC around that structure.  I like this idea. 

As an example:  I build the inn at the edge of the city, and the Inn has a two radius ZOC, as opposed to most structures that have just one, so the ZOC pushes out farther from the Inn. 

Building placement would be riskier if WHERE you attack a city determines which structures might be damaged in said attack, but that's a subject of another thread...

I like the idea of effectively warring indirectly against another faction by tring to push your influence into their zone of control. However the AI needs to see this as a negative thing to do. For example it should modify their relationship with the perpetrator downwards and if it results in taking control of cties or important resources may even lead to war.

This being said it therefore needs to be controllable, since at the moment you can quite easily take control of a resource without actually intending too, therefore this would lead to a disgruntled neighbour, whom you didn't want to piss off. So maybe also a diplomatic option to relinquish control of certain squares. This could then also be used for diplomatic gain.

Taking this one step futher. Maybe you could trade whole resource control, which would then flip the resource to the ZOC of the new owner. For example you might have wargs that you can't use and an ally who can. You can diplomatically trade control of the tile (and maybe some tiles surrounding it) and those tiles would now show Empire influence too, within your Kingdom. This would not generate influence of it's own and would expire after a set period of time flipping control back to you.

If you go back to old text games like atlantis, they had a hex grid where the hexes ran north south, and the vertical grid reference moved by 2 for each hex, if you moved north east the reference shifted by 1 column and 1(not 2) in the vertical direction.  This is effectively a square grid with holes but you can easily tell if the reference is valid as both coordinates have to be even or both have to be odd.

It's not "being focused on". It's one developer spending some time on solving a problem, and then finding it interesting enough to share with us.

That's why it's a "developer journal". They shouldn't have to pass it through marketing to make sure that it's "on message about 1.1" if it's just something interesting.  (In fact the single most interesting Sins developer journal was explaining in painstaking detail why a desync happens.)

Ya, I love these tidbits. Even if it's not official 1.1 propaganda.

The reason the limit exists, which is actually 5 tiles, is to prevent cities from connecting.  This would not help two cities with roughly the same influence could easily be built right next to each other.

Currently, it picks whoever has the lower player ID to break ties.  I'd like to change this to whoever has been influencing the tile the longest, if it doesn't slow down the calculations too much.

Yes, I'll be working on making the corners more rounded.

I wrote about what I was working on.  I continue to reply because people seem interested.

If I actually had wanted to write a dev journal about the spells, I would have had to ask marketing because that's more of a feature than a fix.

As it is, I find that many people are interested in a journal like this because it gives them insight into the development process, whatever the topic. 

There's alot of talk about culture flipping in this thread, and I wanted to point out that the issue is more complex in a fantasy game than in a game like Civ. In Civ, your dealing with people whos culture changes according to their interest, while in fantasy games factions can sometimes be different species with completely irreconcilable needs and wants. 

For example, you wouldn't want your city to join another faction whos inhabitants survive by eating your species for breakfast... 

And I"m glad you did, these are pretty interesting.

carielf, just a suggestion regarding the resource flip, why not have it as whichever has the MOST influence, so that we ( the players AND AI )can use influence as a peaceful(ie not declared war) means of gaining territory unless the resource is for one alignment only(eg horses & wargs)

harpo

I was just asking

I'm just anxious to see more about 1.1 and what it will entail. I had no idea that it couldn't be disclosed. My bad!

Cheers,

V.

Fair enough (and I don't know where I got the 2 from). Now that I think about it, city merging could be pretty cool... but also really difficult to handle, given the way limits work. I just don't like being unable to build on a (possibly newly discovered) resource between two cities just because I failed to plan for it when I founded the cities. If someone can find a way around that (I admit I can't, at least not readily) and implement it, that would make me happy.

This is the way it is intended; the playerID / "whoever has owned the tile longest" is only for breaking ties if both players have equal influence over the tile.

Well that was very interesting! Very cool to see the thought process on how this type of stuff works! Thanks!

"Euclidean distance"....yeah....just rolls of the tongue

Got no idea what it means but I'm always impressed when I see chicks talking about technical things like this.