Playing around with a Tactical Map

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One of the common feature requests I've had for War Worlds is tha ability to "zoom out". I think it's a good idea, to help you plan your empire's expansion and also to help you find where your opponents stars are more easily.

But I think just a simple "zoom" function, which would just render the current view, but smaller, is not that useful. You want something that presents the extra information that you can get from a wider view in a new and useful way.

So to that end, I've been playing around with the idea of a "tactical" map. The idea of the tactical map is that instead of rendering the starfield as it appears in the regular starfield view, you get a view which removes a lot of the visual clutter and just presents the interesting information. In particular, the main point of the tactical map is not so much the individual stars as extent of your (and your enemy's) empire. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's a quick example of what I'm thinking of:

What you see here is just a test app I made to see what it looks like, but basically the red dots would represent stars and the green shaded areas represent area of influence. Basically, each of the stars inside a green shaded area is colonized by an empire.

So what this means is, if you were the guy on the left in the image below, you'd see quite clearly that the guy on the right is up to something...

This is just a quick test app I threw together to see how it looks, but I think this could be useful. Obviously the shading is not that great (it'd be nicer if the edges were smooth, say) but it's not bad for a first pass, I reckon.

You could tap on the individual stars (points) to see a little bit of an overview of what's going on at that star, and the ability to zoom into the full starfield view and then back to the tactical map would be have to be pretty seemless as well.

Of course, it'll take a little while for this to be integrated into the game, and I'm definitely interested in hearing anybody thoughts on this before I take it much further. Reach out in the comments below (on our Google+ community) with your thoughts!

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