Strategic Values of Railroads Movement

Railroads movement values: 1, 0, 10 from Civ, 2-3, 4 respectively. It makes a strategic difference wether it’s 1 or 0, but there is not a strategical difference wether it’s 3 (roads) or 10. The Civ 4 designers clearly did not understand railroads in Civ.

First decision: What world do we play on?

This is the beginning of a new adventure.  We will build a grand strategy war game in the vein of Risk, Sid Meier’s Civilization, Sim Earth and so on.  We will do this as a single-player computer game in the spirit of the old arcades: the best player gets the most points.   Until we found a satisfying name, we will simply refer to it as “The Computergame” and the thus-called category on this blog will be the container for our notes during its development.

We will design the game while we work on it, step-by-step.  The initial decision involves the question of the shape of the world the games takes play in.  What kind of map do we want to have?

After some thought, two fundamental design decisions were made today:

1. “Luck” will be systematized, thus we can have individual games with “more luck”  or  ”tough luck”.
2. The map will be the most basic one: squares.  No coastlines, no pseudo 3D views, no nothing.

More on the second decision:

• The birds-eye view from Civilization and it’s 4rth reincarnation gives something to the feel the isometric view from Civ2 and many RTS lack. I want to have that in my game.
• In Sim City 2000 you had a little map in the corner of the screen, showing the neighboring cities, each city in it’s square.  I always wondered: is Sim City land a giant sheet of math paper with a city in each rectangle?  Let’s get this in.
• The lines on maps always fascinated me.

With the basic model of a “math paper” map we can have all this and some more.  So the game will be basically conquering math paper, very abstract, very dry.  But I believe this has its own potential as a basis to generate an ultimately fascinating view onto a “kingdom”.

• The thing is this: in Risk, you have one dimension of squares: the countries.  And than you have neighboring countries.  So from a complexity standpoint, “math paper map” is similar to the World Map from Risk the difference being that the number of neighboring countries per countries varies in Risk, were on math paper map it stays the same.