Less predictable land battle maps?

[Destrin]

My take away from playing the Kickstarter demo was that the battlemaps were very heavily tile based. In the two or three missions I placed the areas looked like the whole map had just been cut into quarters and preplaced terrain just plonked down into the 4 quarters of the map. Barn here, field here, crashed UFO here, each area taking up roughly the same footprint. It didn't feel very organic to me.

Is this a limitation in how the battlemaps are built or is this a freak occurrence given I've only played a couple of battles and they are more varied?

[Commissar Pancakes]

It's pretty much the same map for each ship (differing only in size and placement).

This IS due to the game being only pre-Alpha however.

[Gauddlike]

There are currently very few maps in the game.

There are planned to be many more.

There is also a fairly easy to use level and submap editing tool available with the pre order alpha builds.

There should be plenty of map variation in the final version

[flashman]

Levels are made up of a random selection of submaps.

A submap is a pre-created area with a preset size say 15x15 10x10 25x25.

A level is made up of a range of these, depending on the size. They are placed in a pre-selected pattern

Submap sizes can be mixed to create a more organic feel.

When each submap is loaded, it doesnt just use the same one each time. There is a bank, say 6 for each part of the map and the game randomly chooses which submaps are used.

Therefore a level might have 10 submaps in it, with each submap chosen from a list of 6. This gives each finalized level 100's if not 1000's of possible permutations, where one level might be similar and another totally different.

[Belmakor]

Levels are made up of a random selection of submaps.

A submap is a pre-created area with a preset size say 15x15 10x10 25x25.

A level is made up of a range of these, depending on the size. They are placed in a pre-selected pattern

Submap sizes can be mixed to create a more organic feel.

When each submap is loaded, it doesnt just use the same one each time. There is a bank, say 6 for each part of the map and the game randomly chooses which submaps are used.

Therefore a level might have 10 submaps in it, with each submap chosen from a list of 6. This gives each finalized level 100's if not 1000's of possible permutations, where one level might be similar and another totally different.

That's the idea. At present there are very few existing submaps. Now that the Kickstarter is funded expect to see these flesh out quite quickly though - also modders will be at it i'm sure!

[Chris]

Yeah, there'll be more map variation in the final game, although there's always going to be a certain regularity to the maps because they are made of square / rectangular blocks. There's currently only one map per tileset per UFO type.

[Yuthar]

I would like to suggest creating a random map generator. Shouldn't be too hard taking in to account that maps are being build by titles. Plus implement forests area, where are no civilian or buildings, yet will all the difficulties that such area provides (low visibility, obstacle for firing e.t.c)

[Gauddlike]

Shouldn't be too hard?

The maps are only semi random at the moment and they still sometimes come up with doors that open onto walls instead of footpaths.

The current system works, it is just at an early stage so isn't well populated yet.

Think of it as a list of random first names and a list of random last names.

At the moment there is only John and Smith available to choose from.

[Targe]

The only way to make this what you want is to open it up to open-source and have players design every square inch of Earth, modelling actual cities, ect and modelling land to match geographic locals (which would be gloriously awesome)

The developers do not have the time to make the level of detail you want, so I think it should be available for players to mod.