Fix to movement problem

[Steven-n-Donna]

I recently read in a thread that the distance to move sideways is about equal to moving 1.5 spaces. Without ditching the chess board style layout, I remembered some demo of a game I downloaded like 8 years ago which the squares were 6 sided honey come shapes which fit together. This gives you an equal sideways movement. The only true problem I see with it is the fact that individuals create their own ship images. Isn't a 6 sider a hectagon?
The next step in realism for the game would to dictate the direction the ship was facing to fire, and rate of speed to turn.
No hard U'ies in a Dreadnaught.
I would go with larger ship images if I went to the honey comb shapes though. More details.
If you limited the way a certain type of gun could fire, you could add a lot more strategic game play. It would give smaller escort and destroyer class ships more of a use than just what you had to use at the beginning of the game. More types of weapons too, like phaser banks (sweep to all sides-lower power) and extra thrusters to make them hard turns that dump over coffee cups.
If you implemented splash damage and fixed the fleet ordering problem( one ship moves at a time in a fleet instead of all together) you would have an awesome tactical simulator in the game!
You could build sE5 out of all these options alone and sell it as is.
add comments!

Steve

[Jubala]

People have asked Aaron for hex grids for years and he keeps saying "Never!". It's a good idea and I like it, but it just won't happen. Aaron likes his squares.

[Aristoi]

Does anyone know of a good space combat game that uses these ideas? It's been a while since I emerged from my SE4 cave.

[Suicide Junkie]

Hex grids are hard. The only programs that use 'em are fairly simple, I suppose because they spent all their time working on the Hexgrid system

[Marty Ward]

I don't know how hard hexes are to program, almost every traditional computer wargame uses them. The hard part would be 3-d hexes!

[Cyrus]

Hex's aren't all that difficult and they actually involve less checking for an AI, multiples of six rather than mulitples of eight. The only reason why I've never wanted to write one is that you can't use a simple data structure, like a two dimensional array, to hold a game board. You have to use something more complicated like a graph.