Subliminal wrote:
In all actuality, what you have done here is to complicate the mapping system overall in order to induce point deviation to to discourage accurate mapping assistance with the use of the coordinate system. I doubt the average player would know how to find let alone calculate a 6 or 8 digit coordinate set.
I dont see where you have come up with a 6 or 8 digit coordinate set. Its a simple concept to apply a single coordinate value to multiple points on the map that are close together. All one would need to know is where in general they are in the game.
I do think that the complicated part of my suggestion only involves making a map that is a realistic representation of a sphere or planet. This is everything i said in my 'four drawbacks', and all of this is unapplicable if the new map were to be flat (and not a representation of a sphere).
Subliminal wrote:
This will be a deterent to fleets but not limit them entirely, nor will it prevent the average player from accurately mapping out the game. With any grid, if you know and can see a land mark, it's not that hard to count how many spaces in what direction to the next landmark. Sure it makes mapping harder and it will necessitate those insistent upon fleet manuevers to come to some sort of agreement where their map point 0/0 is but it can be done rather easily.
From the picture provided in the email about PTW2 it seems that islands are going to take up a fairly large ammount of area on the map and each tile movable is going to be fairly small. If there are nearly as many islands and towns in the new version as there are in the current version, then the map is going to be huge and the scale of movement is going to be very small, thus making the distance between islands in terms of tiles huge and hard to keep track of. This virtually eliminates the use of 'landmarks' and tile counting as an even remotely accurate way to make a map of the grid.
Have you ever played the game
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker? This game is of a seafairing adventure, and the map provided has a coordinate system, however each coordinate covers an area so large that the map can really only be used to get to a general region in the game, making finding stuff like sunken treasure a pain because of the maps inaccuracy. The reason i point this out is because if the new grid that PTW will be played on is large enough, then an individual landmark in a specific coordinate's 'region' could possibly be out of the veiwing range of your ship, thus making it very hard to judge exactly where your ship is.
The point of a world map to a pirate would have been to find where in relation to the rest of the world he was. There is nothing accurate about saying "i am at 80 degrees west and 21 degrees north." this would mean that you are in that general region, given that the general region you specified is 12454 square kilometers in area.