Optimal base placement

[MaXX]

Hi all,

I am a longtime ufo fan and always was a big riddle for me to find out the optimal placement of my bases. My considerations was that the bases should me most far away from eachother for masking the most of the Earth. In this case, if it is possible, the 8 bases were on the edges of hypothetical cube. Finally I wrote a simple program to find out the best placement. I never tought that it is nearly possible to find a this type of base layout.

If you want to know, my base placement can be found at http://bmelectronics.eu/maxx/best_placement.png and my program is at http://bmelectronics.eu/maxx/t2.cc (sorry there is no doc - if you are interested, I can write one).

thank you,

MaXX

[BTAxis]

Interesting. Of course, one problem I can see with that setup is that a lot of bases cover mostly ocean. At the start of the game you typically want your bases to be smack in the middle of a land mass because that maximizes your chances of downing/finding UFOs over land. After all, you can't place all 8 bases from the start (though currently income is much too high so making 8 bases is not difficult).

[Mattn]

hey, nice - we are searching c++ programmers btw

[MaXX]

My program calculates currently the 4096x2048 map I've found in the 2.3-dev. It will found a bit better base placement, but my athlon64 2.5GHz x2 will calculate it for 3-4 days.

Mattn: You want to port the current code to c++? I think it is a good idea, and not a big work.

BTaxis: Yes, you have right. Personally I like start with two bases, on Hawai and on New Zealand ;-) even it is a fallback in the game mechanics but I love this ;-) Starting base on Hawaii has a good effect: you don't need to raid the crashed ufos, because they are lost in sea. I don't like too much combat, particularly with the starting technologies, and can find enough research goals on the terror sites, too. To reach more combat in the starting phase of the game, we can start with the Sibera/South Africa/Portugalia bases with my placement.

[Mattn]

Mattn: You want to port the current code to c++? I think it is a good idea, and not a big work.

no, not the game - but the mapeditor for the game - see src/tools/radiant and do ./configure --enable-gtkradiant to build it. we also have some todo list entries (in our wiki) about the mapeditor changes that we want to see included

[MaXX]

Why makes radiant so important? I've seen hundreds of locations in the game, most of them is generated randomly. It seems enough for me.

Congratula for your 1<<11 -th post :-)

[BTAxis]

It's never enough.

[shevegen]

A simplified tool that "overlays" a short grid when you place/build a new the barrier could be
nice ie supposed to show the "typical" radar area (before you actually place the base)

And what could also be nice a small counter to the lower left or lower right that calculcates
the coordinates on the globe - nothing important but this would be fancy