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The Problem With Hexagons

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Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#21

Post by jandrese »

alanbernstein wrote: post #17
QuercusMax wrote: post #14

The "drunken hexagon walk" doesn't really seem like a big deal to me. In the real world, terrain will prevent you from moving in a straight line in many cases. Just like any type of 2D map projection, hexes distort the world to some degree, but it's a lot less than square grids.

I don't think of traversing a hex path as following the "drunken" trajectories shown in the article. The hexes are just a guide to estimate distance; the trajectory "actually followed" is simply a line from A to B. This article is about a weird, arbitrarily chosen, ultra-pedantic interpretation of the tool, and not at all about its practical use.

It depends if the game makes you pay for facing changes. In that case the drunken walk ends up being much slower.

Of course you can say "so make facing changes free", but that can be a substantial chunk of the movement strategy, especially if the units are fairly slow. And it definitely won't feel right if your Roman Legions can do doughnuts right outside the city.

The best compromise I've seen is Dream Pod 9's system that allows one free hexside change when you enter a hex. I don't know why more games don't adopt that rule.

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#22

Post by Qwertystop »

woliveirajr wrote: post #12

I remember when I was a kid and tried to draw my own map. By hand, of course, as printers have barely been invented and having a PC in your house was a thing for few 100s families in the world. Now that we have PCs and color printers everywhere, I ask: is there any software ("app" for the younger ones) for creating your own maps for wargames? Which one does the HN community recommend? And I think I found a new use fo…

Well, there's a wide variety of drawing/painting software. Anything that has layers and transparency and allows freeform, Bézier curve, and straight-line drawing should be plenty. And that's most of them. Personally, I like Krita.

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#23

Post by anderskaseorg »

Meh. A plain square grid has a speed range of 1.414 to 1 (because of the diagonal approximation error); a plain hexagonal grid has a speed range of 1.155 to 1 (because of the “drunken hexagon walk” at 30° angles); and a square grid with the complicated diagonal adjustment for people who can multiply by 1.414 in their heads still has a speed range of 1.082 to 1 (because of the analogous “drunken octagon walk” at 22.5° angles). Not much of an improvement for forcing people to do mental floating-point arithmetic.

Furthermore, hex grids have a neat property that square grids lack: every path is also a wall that blocks other paths from crossing it from one side to the other, and vice versa. This is the property that makes Hex (the board game) work.

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#24

Post by crooked-v »

kod wrote: post #11

For games that simulate a particular conflict, irregular polygons are a better option than hexes or squares. They still have the benefits of discrete movement, but allow for baking terrain related factors directly into the map, instead of having a separate table. Great example of this is Napoleon's Triumph: http://www.simmonsgames.com/products/Austerlitz/Map.html

The computer games Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings 2, Imperator: Rome, and others by Paradox Development use something like this by splitting up the map into irregularly-shaped provinces that can have a variable number of connections with other provinces (including tactical considerations such as penalties from river crossings) and have different travel speeds for armies based on the sizes of particular provinces.

A simple visual example of somebody looking at the diplomacy view of their country in EU4: https://i.imgur.com/hfI8NnM.jpg

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#25

Post by VyseofArcadia »

So with squares you have 4 sides, and you typically go in 8 directions, the problem being that the diagonals cover 1.41 and change times as much distance.

With hexes you have 6 sides and you typically go in 6 directions... huh? Why are we suddenly leaving out the "diagonals?" Well if you did take them we're off by 1.15 and change.

If left the diagonals out of square movement you'd have the same "drunken walk" problem as hexes. If you allowed diagonal movement on hex grids you'd have the same problem as diagonal movement on square grids.

Every hexes vs. squares debate leaves out that most of the pros and cons are totally imaginary and only exist because we artificially restrict our available options on the hex grid or, on the other side of the coin, artificially inflate our options on square grids.

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#26

Post by _bxg1 »

There's a trick you can do with squares that makes them much more accurate than normal; not sure how they would then compare to hexagons.

Instead of treating each diagonal step as "1", you treat the first diagonal step as 1, the second as 2, the third as 1, the fourth as 2, etc. Averaged out, this makes diagonal movements cost 1.5 steps each, which happens to be attractively close to 1.414.

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#27

Post by DonGabo »

woliveirajr wrote: post #12

I remember when I was a kid and tried to draw my own map. By hand, of course, as printers have barely been invented and having a PC in your house was a thing for few 100s families in the world. Now that we have PCs and color printers everywhere, I ask: is there any software ("app" for the younger ones) for creating your own maps for wargames? Which one does the HN community recommend? And I think I found a new use fo…

Grid Cartographer is great. https://gridcartographer.com/

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#28

Post by smogcutter »

The article is interesting (and I want to look further into their game), but I think misses the part of the downside of removing hexes: more precision isn't always a good thing.

I play a lot of tabletop wargames, and the convention there is to measure with a ruler rather than hexes. The intent of the rules, generally, is to model real performance: say a turn represents 15 minutes, and an inch on the tabletop is 25 yards, then a napoleonic battalion (or whatever) should be able to move a distance that reflects how far they could actually march in 15 minutes.

The problem with that level of precision is that you have a degree of control that's totally inaccessible to a real commander. You wind up moving units in fiddly, ahistorical ways in order to take best advantage of the rules.

Most modern wargame rules try to overcome this in various ways, but hexes totally eliminate it: anything subtle enough to happen in an area smaller than a hex gets abstracted away. This isn't just a rules mechanism, it's a philosophical position on how much detail a commander has access to.

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#29

Post by yellowapple »

crooked-v wrote: post #24
kod wrote: post #11

For games that simulate a particular conflict, irregular polygons are a better option than hexes or squares. They still have the benefits of discrete movement, but allow for baking terrain related factors directly into the map, instead of having a separate table. Great example of this is Napoleon's Triumph: http://www.simmonsgames.com/products/Austerlitz/Map.html

The computer games Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings 2, Imperator: Rome, and others by Paradox Development use something like this by splitting up the map into irregularly-shaped provinces that can have a variable number of connections with other provinces (including tactical considerations such as penalties from river crossings) and have different travel speeds for armies based on the sizes of particular provinc…

Stellaris applies the same to star systems and their hyperspace interconnections. I miss the other forms of FTL travel possible in that game (warp drives were nice for their simplicity, and wormhole generators were a great challenge), but the hyperlanes do make it feel more like "EU4 in Space™".

Re: The Problem With Hexagons

#30

Post by dalore »

tgb wrote: post #3

There's a huge upside the article misses. Having discrete movement allows the rules to be easily and exactly mentally simulated by humans. And that is key to a lot of tactical thought where you enumerate the possible responses and counter responses you and your opponent can have. For the opposite side of the spectrum, see the excellent game Frozen Synapse which has non-discrete motion and so to allow this "simulate t…

But then one might say you miss the point of war games. The point isn't to have exact movement and have it calculated like chess, it's meant to be messy. War is messy and analog. The war games are trying to capture the real life element of war which isn't at all like go or chess with exact movements.
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