Territories, not circles
The board is regions again. Voronoi cells divide it with no gaps and no overlaps and look like a board, which is what this was always supposed to be. What they cannot do is reproduce every adjacency in the rules, because provinces interleave -- the Adriatic borders Venice with Trieste between their centres. The lesson I drew from that was to abandon regions and draw the adjacency graph, which is unimpeachable and is not a map. It is circles joined by lines. The right answer is to stop asking the picture to carry the rules. Clicking a province lights up exactly where its unit may legally go, taken from the graph rather than from which shapes happen to share an edge. Vienna lights Bohemia, Galicia, Budapest, Trieste and Tyrolia; a fleet on the north coast of Spain does not light the Gulf of Lyon. The picture is a picture and the rules answer for themselves when asked.
This commit is contained in:
@@ -42,17 +42,22 @@ other three games use, on a map generated from the topology in
|
||||
in Europe -- and everything else is drawn from those and from the adjacency
|
||||
rules.
|
||||
|
||||
**It draws the graph, not regions, and that was not the first idea.** The
|
||||
first idea was Voronoi cells: every point on the board belonging to the
|
||||
nearest province, which gives a handsome cut-paper board. It is also wrong.
|
||||
Sixty-five pairs that border each other in the rules came out with regions
|
||||
that did not touch, and no amount of moving coordinates would fix it, because
|
||||
the fault is structural -- provinces here interleave. The Adriatic borders
|
||||
Venice with Trieste sitting between their centres; the Atlantic borders North
|
||||
Africa around the outside of Spain. Convex cells cannot say that, and a map
|
||||
that shows two regions meeting when the rules say they do not is worse than
|
||||
an ugly map. It is a map that loses you the game. So adjacency is drawn as
|
||||
lines, which say exactly what the rules say and cannot be misread.
|
||||
**Territories, with the rules kept out of the picture.** The regions are
|
||||
Voronoi cells -- every point belonging to the nearest province -- which
|
||||
divides the board with no gaps and no overlaps and looks like a board.
|
||||
|
||||
What it cannot do is reproduce every adjacency in the rules, because
|
||||
provinces here interleave: the Adriatic borders Venice with Trieste sitting
|
||||
between their centres, and the Atlantic borders North Africa round the
|
||||
outside of Spain. Convex cells cannot say that.
|
||||
|
||||
The wrong lesson to draw from that -- and the one I drew first -- is to give
|
||||
up on regions and draw the adjacency graph instead. It is unimpeachable and
|
||||
it is not a map; it is circles joined by lines. The right answer is to stop
|
||||
asking the picture to carry the rules. **Click a province and exactly the
|
||||
provinces its unit may legally reach light up**, taken from the adjacency
|
||||
graph itself. The picture is a picture, and the rules answer for themselves
|
||||
when they are asked.
|
||||
|
||||
**It gets the whole screen.** The other three games live in a four-by-three
|
||||
cabinet because the machines they are rebuilding did. This one is not
|
||||
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user