Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps

bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"

Comments

Re:Square to hexagon conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

From a computational chemist point of view, who uses both square and hexagonal lattice all the time, it isn't that difficult/strange actually. Thanks to the fact that periodic boundaries are used, it will just be a 'simple' conversion. The main issue one might encounter though is the fact that you'll go from 8 neighbours to 6 neighbours (if I am not mistaken the diagonals are also counted as neighbours in Civ4..., otherwise it's 4 to 6).
Plus I believe they actually wanted to limit the diagonal travelling, so it makes sense to prevent the diagonal 4x4, instead of encouraging it.
No, I am not worried about the conversion of the lattice/map. What I am worried about is the fact that in Civ5 it won't be possible to have more than 1! army per tile. So what will happen to the other dozen armies that were on the converted tile?

Re:Square to hexagon conversion

[gravos]

Civ 4 map plots are squares. Civ 5 are hexagons. I don't see an easy conversion process that won't produce real not-just-semantic map differences

Someone at reddit posted a diagram of how to do this fairly easily: http://i.imgur.com/lpJRd.png

The only problem is with moving resources out of city limits, etc... things which may or may not be practical problems.