SMAC-like game with millions of tiles

[bvanevery]

In the early 2000s I tried to make a game called "Ocean Mars".  It was to be like SMAC but with a more realistic, hard science premise of how we'd really get off of Earth.  The one facet of our solar system's evolution that I changed, is that Mars is habitable.  Since then, we've made enough discoveries that the idea of a water bearing Mars is not implausible.  We would just have needed to evolve in a bit of a hotter period on our own planet, I suppose.  Ok, don't make me hand wave away the dinosaurs, I know that mammals needed some cold to arise.  The point is, I premised my game on changing only one thing about science as we know it today, and not nearly as big a stretch as pretending we're going to manage some kind of interplanetary drive.  Although I did look at real science on that as well, courtesy of The Starflight Handbook.

Long story short, I eventually went bankrupt.  I had a big problem with obsessing about too much planetary detail, trying to model Mars down to 10 km/hex.  I redid my memory model and game topology 4 times before giving up.  Almost complete rewrites.  There were things I knew about programming back then and things that I didn't.  I definitely know how I'd implement a planet now, but due to other game design problems of the 4X TBS genre that I haven't solved, I haven't made any serious second attempt yet.

I'm currently writing and still playing my most prolific AAR ever, complete with full illustrations.  It is titled "Miriam Makes Me Shiver" and you can find it with the link thus:

Obligatory early exploration and guess who's south of me?  I realized I might have to fight someone for this land mass, but I didn't expect it so soon.  Not long ago, I was in exactly the same situation with the Believers.  I made the mistake of signing a Treaty and thinking I could out-maneuver them while colonizing.  I can't.  They have support, I have a growth penalty, they colonize faster than I do.  Long story short, I experimented with heroic stands for awhile and then quit.  A Treaty is clearly the wrong decision with Believers at close quarters.

In this game I've done a lot of land raising.  None of it has been for my usual military land bridges.  All of it has been to make "lebensraum" for my own colonies in a rough radius from my capitol.  Then I had the Manifold Nexus far out at sea, so I decided to link that too.  I have to say, although my efforts have been practical at preserving water topology and resource specials, the result is ugly.  What a crap world this looks like, with all these stupid square tiles and square shapes!

This is one kind of thing that a game with millions of tiles can solve.  Sure it creates other problems, like coming up with a whole new way of directing units for combat.  I haven't figured that out; if I ever had, in all these years, I would have made that game a long time ago.  Who knows, maybe I've missed something and eventually I'll figure it out.  Or come up with something adequate, if it doesn't strictly solve the problem.  Anyways, I just want better coastlines!  A prettier planet.  I could even live without the world being a sphere, did I mention that I tried to implement a sphere all that time ago?  But as long as I'm at it, might as well do a sphere as well.