Infinity X - Game Design - A first look
There’s a lot of info here, so if your time is short you can skip the third and fourth paragraph (not counting this one). Not that it’s not useful (… i didn’t delete it) but some of us just aren’t as bored as I right now 
a map would be created with tiles, each either 32×32 or 64×64. Since a variable zoom feature (you can zoom anywhere from say world map to really really close - ‘anywhere’ possibly and probably being at least 10 choices). Maps will be various sizes, some perfect for quick close-combat (not my favorite, btw), others more suitable for long-term build-up (unless the AI has a say in it 
). I’m not sure, but if any unit is one tile, and a building can be either small (1tile) or large (4tiles), i suppose small maps of 50×50 would be suitable (i think, obviously haven’t tested it yet), while bigger maps could be… 400×400? Too much… 100×100 and huge 200×200? Perhaps maps should be 50×50, 75×75, 100×100, 150×150 or 200×200, nicknamed (for example) tiny, small, medium, big, huge.
There will be several types of tiles… Obviously there’s water for sea units only, there’s land for land units only. There’s also the divider between the two, the coast, which is either impassable to either unit (so only for air or amphibious units) or passable to land units only (or rather, impassable to sea units only). Besides these, there can be obstructions (big rock), categorized as air units only. It was impossible to do so in MAX, but perhaps it would be a nice feature to allow bulldozers to clear the rock, gaining you not only valuable landspace, but also some materials in the process.
All units would follow a general line of MAX. For land units there would be a cargo unit for each resource (gold, fuel, minerals), a bulldozer (to clear the debris of destroyed units/buildings), engineer (small buildings), constructor (big buildings), land mine layer… Offensive land units would include (from most armor/least range/most shots/least power to… the opposite) a tank, assault gun, rocket launcher (which damages 9 tiles, handy for mine removal), missile launcher. Almost forgot the mobile radar unit, and a special is the anti-aircraft unit (although, why would it not be able to attack other land units as well? - probably a lot easier to code i suppose), and of course a few others. Amphibious units are rather scarce including a surveyor (to see which tile has sufficient deposits -infinite deposits btw- for a mine, a deposits being either gold, fuel or minerals. In MAX any given mine had all three (nearly always, unless you made a mistake placing it), and while it would be best for any mine to have two, i think having all three for most mines would be a bad idea. You should have two of course so a player can choose whether he would prefer to mine more materials or more gold (for example), or if he needed 6 more fuel he could use the sliders and adjust for it (without having to always build another mine first).
Got sidetracked… Another amphibious unit is the scout (low firepower/hits/armor/range, high speed/radar) which loses speed in water (the ratio in MAX was about 1 speed/tile on land and 3 speed/tile on water). The last amphibious unit was a personnel carrier. There were two land units: the infiltrator (the only stealth unit, one of two units able to see infiltrators) capable of stealing units and disabling units/buildings, and the infantry, much stronger but with only special ability to detect (and destroy, heh) infiltrators. They’re not really strong enough for anything else but forgetting/disregarding them can be as devastating as leaving out anti-aircraft turrets (imagine if they shut down your turrets, or worse your radar). No wait, another stealth unit is the submarine. Strangely enough interplay chose for airplanes not being able to spot submarines. There were only two ships able to spot submarines, another submarine or… an escort. Similarly, only one ship (and one land unit) could fire upon airplanes (the corvette and the mobile anti-aircraft). As for airplanes, there was an airplane carrier which could carry 3 land units (for speedy travel), an AWAC (radar unit), a fighter (to fire upon air units) and a ground attack plane (unable to fire upon air units).
There were two types of upgrades, one by gold (from mines); another by having research stations (buildings). A research station needed one power/turn, and one human unit. ‘human units’ came from buildings called Habitats, which needed one power to be active and supplied 6 ‘human units’ which could each be used to either power a research station, power an ecosphere (for points based victory - and only that), or to power the human units factory (to build an infantry or an infiltrator).
Enough about that. What i really wanted to tell you about was the speed. I figured out a good enough system to use, not counting the air units (although, with some modification it could be used for them - indirectly). Let’s take a scout unit and give him, say, 15 speed. Internally we’ll keep track of this as 150. A regular, horizontal or vertical move takes 10 (or to the user, 1 speed). A diagonal move takes 14. A move in the water (the scout is amphibious) would take 30, a diagonal move in the water would take 42. Finally, a move on the road would take 2 or 3 horizontally. As far as speed goes, the scout is the most complex unit so this actually takes care of any situation (except maytbe the air units). Sound like a good system?
