Starfire on a square grid

[Caplin]

Hi All,

I'm just curious if anyone has ever tried playing SF on a square grid. Would it dilute the feel of the game too much? You could presumably either stick to the basic four directions for ship facing, or allow for all eight to be used.

Any thoughts?

[Cralis]

Hi All,

I'm just curious if anyone has ever tried playing SF on a square grid. Would it dilute the feel of the game too much? You could presumably either stick to the basic four directions for ship facing, or allow for all eight to be used.

Any thoughts?

I've never tried it. The biggest issue is that the turn modes are based upon 60-degree turns, while a square grid will have 90-degree turns. Although if you keep every ship's TM the same, I don't suppose it matters a whole lot.

Of course, thinking about it, I'm thinking that I'd not use the center of the squares but the vertices... the corner points of the square. If you use the 4 corners and the center of all 4 sides, then it would increase the number of facings to all 8 vertices (each corner of the square plus the center between each corner), and it would provide for a much finer movement control.

Of course, then turns are reduced to 45-degrees instead of 60-degrees, but again as long as you keep every ship's TM the same it shouldn't matter much.

[Caplin]

Yeah, turn mode was what immediately occurred to me. I think I'm going to try keeping everything as is for now and see how things go. I just created a big 61x61 spreadsheet, which is the closest I can come to the system map at the moment.

I think the "blind spot," will be the 90 degree arc behind ships. I wish I didn't have to resort to hacks like this, but until I can come up with an abstraction I'm comfortable with, or a workable hex map equivalent, it'll have to do