JAMiAM
Posts: 6165
Joined: 2/8/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ralphtrick quote:
ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay quote:
ORIGINAL: GreenDestiny I have a question, what were they thinking when they decided to put the rivers through the hex instead of the hex sides? What are the benefits of this? Because... I just don’t get it. This game has so much detail in it I find it hard to believe they would add something like this in it without some kind of a benefit. But it seems like now no one knows what going on when it comes to defending on a river hex, let alone attacking from it or around it. Almost every wargame that I have has rivers on the hex-sides, so what’s the deal with this one. I believe the rationale had to do with riverine units - which must travel on rivers, and bridges - which require blowing, repair, and targeting. It would have been much more complicated to shift those functions from the hex to the hexside. I expect there was also an aesthetic aspect as well. Note that the few hexside features (minor & major escarpments) don't actually fall on the hexside, but are just within the hex. Hexside rivers would require the same - creating the same confusion. Or they would have to look like the featureless "border" to be placed actually on the hexside. Having a river feature that both looked like a winding river and actually fit on the hexside would probably have been too technically complicated - impacting tiles on both sides of the hex. And it's debatable which mode is the more accurate. Rivers certainly do have sides to them, but they are not microscopically thin and perfectly straight. Their widths actually do take up some space, they do wind around, and have local tributaries. The river might be all over that 10km hex, and an attack that looks parallel to the river on the TOAW map may actually afford the defenders the benefit of one of its curves or tributaries. Riverine units are the first good reason I've heard against hex-side rivers, thanks. The rest of the items that I've heard about could be dealt with. If I do hex-side rivers, I'm probably going to have to not allow riverine units in those scenarios. That feels like a reasonable compromise. The thought of trying to deal with them in a reasonable way gives me a head-ache, I'm not sure how to do it without causing confusion. There are a lot of reasons why hex-side rivers are a bad idea. They are ugly. They create a problem in the interface for trying to designate a bombing attack against them. They create a problem in the interface for trying to effect a bridge repair against a hexside. They present a calculation problem for determining ferry capacity. Do you sum all engineering assets in the moving unit's hex, the target hex, both? The aforementioned Riverine movement issue.
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