This is something that I think the AI should try to do, and I don't think it would be overly hard to code some simple logic rules (not a coder like you or Brad, so if I'm wrong let me know)

a) When the AI builds an improvement, have the AI try to build the influence towards an unclaimed special resource tile if possible.  Unsure if there should be any exceptions to this.  Second priority should be goodie huts.  Maybe the third priority should be towards chokepoints.  Fourth priority towards other zones of influence.

when the player builds somethings, have the same AI logic used to place the player's building if unspecified by the player (I'm sure you do this already)

Maybe at lower difficulties it would be more random.

It already does matter, just not as much and not for typical buildings. You can build a line of buildings out towards a resource and then build a missionary/town hall.

Hexes can be done as a two demisional array (Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic seems to) if the shape of the map is roughly rectangular/square. It just complicates accessing the 'adjacent' tiles, but the overhead is offset by only having to access 6 rather than 8. The main issue is the logic is harder to work out as the way to do it is not obvious.

Edit:

It would have two cases for accessing the adjacent hexes. In AoWSM, the hexes line up into colums, and the X value offset for a hex in a given colum is the same as a square grid. Accessing the hexes above and below it are the same as a square grid (+/- 1 in the Y offset). Depending on if the colum is even or odd (which one it is depends on how the hexes are placed) will determine how to get the adjacent left/right above/below the target hex. In one case the ones above will have a Y offset that is one less that the current and those below will use the same Y offset. The other case will have those above have the same Y offset and those below have an offset that is 1 greater. Switching between these two cases would only add the overhead of an if statement that checks to see if the colum is even or odd (X % 2). If the hexes are oriented diffrently (like in HoMM 1 through 3 for the tactical combat) then row is interchangable for colum.

I like the changes. Nice work!

carielf, in several of my games I have had a situation where my influence completely surrounded another faction's city and had actually forced the other factions influence to within it's city, at that point I was more or less expecting the other faction's city to switch to my faction, is this sort of situation going to be added in in future?

harpo

It's not currently planned, but I personally would like to see that implemented since it was very useful in GalCiv2.

carielf, if you could add it to wanted/desired features list it would be appreciated.

thank you

harpo

Your language of "marking" everything in the bounding rect imply to me that you've bypassed the Euclidean calculations. I'd suggest that for the sake of adjacent borders, you're still going to need a proper "distance" calculation to get things to work right.

Personally I'd rather have a game use Euclidean distance for idealistic reasons, but Elemental already isn't a Euclidean game for units (see: treatment of diagonals) so you should be using the Chebyshev distance. It's still computationally cheaper (no squares or root, just absolute values and a comparison) and, I'd say, will give more intuitive results when borders are contested than some rectangle system.

Edit: And you should be able to use the old Euclidean-based code and simply replace the calculation formula[e]. Alternately, you can use the Euclidean distance only for determining tiebreakers when area is contested (otherwise I see awkward looking tiebreaker scenarios), but allowing cities to extend via Chebyshev distance to empty land.

All that said, how is the new, proper handling of influence going to affect the limits regarding building within 2 tiles of an existing city? It seems that once influence becomes more firm as a mechanic, you could keep track of exactly which map tiles "belong" to which city, avoiding the awkwardness that sometimes arises when attempting to claim a resource between two cities.

I feel like influence should bubble a little from sources of prestige when compared to corners that are just workshops or something; if you're going to make it the growth conform to the shape of the city at all.

Here, I'd suggest making the influence revolts be based on the housing perhaps?

You get a majority of the housing, or the town center if there is no housing- you get the town.

my thoughts are based upon the town 'voting' which faction is best for the town, ie stay with the faction they are in and have a tiny influence area OR switch to the surrounding faction and GAIN access to the resources of the influence zone, possibly also factoring in what improvements are in the town, eg pubs,ins,townhalls and their equivelents contributing to the stay, and if the  surrounding faction HAS MORE of the improvements in it's surrounding towns, then switch.

harpo

It is already using the Chebyshev distance formula just by the way it's coded.  I've also seen this algorithm called the max(dx, dy) algorithm, where dx = change in x and dy = change in y.  

For a city hub at location 0,0 (for convenience, we don't actually use negative coordinates) and radius 2, these are all the points that the code loops through (using 2 for loops, for those of you familiar with programming):

(-2,-2) (-1, -2) (0, -2) (1, -2) (2, -2)

(-2, -1) (-1, -1) (0, -1) (1, -1) (2,-1)

(-2, 0) (-1, 0) (0, 0) (1, 0) (2, 0)

(-2, 1) (-1, 1) (0, 1) (1, 1) (2, 1)

(-2, 2) (-1, 2) (0, 2) (1, 2) (2, 2)

Take the first point, which would fail under the Euclidean method because it would have a distance of 4:

d = max( abs(-2 - 0), abs(-2 - 0) )

d = max (2, 2)

d = 2

Since all points are relative to the center and the radius is 2, the max distance of any point will be less than or equal to 2 already, just because of the way that the loops are setup. 

This does not affect the limitation of how close you can build to another city. While improvements exude influence, the influence is not specific to that city, and with this code, it will be possible to have your own zones of influence overlap, so it wouldn't really help anyway. However, now at least you may be able to get the resource within influence without needing to build another city next to it, and then you could fortify it.  It's not as convenient as having it absorbed into a city, but it will be somewhat improved.

Well what I meant (re: gameplay and building placement) was that if influence/territory is a well-defined quality, perhaps the map tiles could be assigned ownership not only to a player but to a specific city. I am assuming that the "at least two tiles away" rule is meant to simplify the management of improvements-to-cities situation. If each city has its own territory influence that competes against other cities (even in the same nation), then ownership is simple. Granted, I don't know how you're representing these things internally but if it's doable, it would make for more natural feeling gameplay. The two tile limit feels very artificial, and the fact that it can in certain (and by no means exceptional) circumstances lock the player out of a resource tile is annoying; I'd rather not metagame my city placement.

In short, I don't like the two-tile limitation, and it seems to me that the influence boundary calculations might allow it to be removed.

But apart from that, I am curious about [player] boundaries: How will you break ties in influence conflicts?

Okay I like the underlying concept but don't really like the "square" look in the bottom pic and am wondering if the "corners" in the border area can be softened more, if only for an aesthetic effect.  The spread of influence needs to look like an organic flow, IMHO, which is betrayed by hugging the lines of the grid too closely.

This is really looking good! I appreciate all of Stardock's hard work!

Although this all looks and sounds pretty nice, why is this being focused on?

I'd much rather you talk to us about the spells and the core changes that are coming to the game. I didn't even know that there was an issue with ZOC's.

But that's just me

Cheers,

V.

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.