Pheonix Rising

Quick add on the grid. If you look at some of the pictures of how non-grid cities or rural areas are setup for a new SC5 or clone you could actually use a hex or octagon grid system to make lining things up much easier, though a hex grid would conform much better than an octal grid pattern. If any of you have played any wargames you know how many of the maps (if not all) use a hex grid for movement and placement of nearly everything. Going freeform while nice may not be practical on even current high end systems. The graphics cards could handle it but it would require a huge amount of floating point calculations to actually zone and grow a city, at least in some ways. If on the other hand you have the roads and zoning done as more of a paint application where you would draw your roads on the terrain then you could use a fill object to fill zoning around the roads. This leads to the prolem of not having much control of what grows where and possibly being limited to having few plop options. I may find the grid in SC4 clunky and irritating, but I owuld much rather have that than a lot less control on plops. As for a linux port, hell yeah! It wouldn't take much to convert it anyway especially is you build it around OpenAL and Opengl. Tempting.. Ok, somebody petition EA for the source to SC4 already lol