thoughts on grid movement from an actual game designer

[TylerTT 1,295]

(cross post from board game geek)

I saw how provocative this topic was and just wanted to present my two cents. i am not for or against this game, do not own it and have not played it. this post is about numbers, numbers i can divine from my experience working with games at a deep level.

Think for a moment, take a 4 foot by four foot war games table. Now think about how many turns it would take a unit to cross this table, if it moved at six inches each turn it would take, about 7-9 turns depending on your deployment.

 

If i'm not mistaken dust is played on a 9x9 grid right?

 

But what about movement at odd angles?

 

Interestingly enough there is a very keen compromise that I have seen in a few square grid games and apparently it's in dust. the rule is "first diagonal free" if you don't know it allows for one diagonal movement to be made at the same cost as an orthogonal movement.

 

what this does is simply round off the distortion that can happen with square grids so long as a model is not moving more then around 6 total spaces each move. go ahead and measure out the physical distance of these moves, it's remarkably close to where you would end up with just a ruler.

 

It also means there are effectively 8 possible directions of movement each turn if you move one space and 16 unique directions if you move 2 spaces. This is actually more directional options then a two space movement on a hexagon grid (total of 12 directions).

 

Think hard about your war gaming experiences, when do you ever really have more then 16 useful directions? I find I'm considering 2-4 directions for most units, This is even in highly complex games like malifaux.

 

The mathematics of a grid based movement system like this actually do a good job of parodying games like 40K, DBA, and numinous other games.

 

say what you will about the game, but that 9x9 grid has more then enough potential for a good game. just ask shogi players.