You can go straight with hexes too. Just not north or south. East, west, and diagnols are all straight. But for squares, anything not along a north-south or east-west axis requires a non-straight line.

In that case, it is the CEO's preference. Although, Hex tiles would be nice to play with. I seem to have forgotten that East-West is straight in a Hex map as well. having only North-South axis as non-straight seems to lean me slightly in favor of Hex maps.

However, to state non-straight lines as "The nature of the Beast" is amatuer and rudimentary at best. I understand your point, but still ...

In any case, I used to play BattleCry with Hex maps, and that worked wonderfully (as a tactical Wargame)

I'm guessing that would require a massive amount of work.

I would prefer they pick one and make it perfect. Having hexes or traingles or randomly shaped tiles with curves and lines that look like they are from an Escher painting can wait for mods/expansions.

Try to draw one and see what happens.

I thought this was a 2010 TBS game that was going to push conventional thinking.   Why are we using squares or hexes when we could use distance and vectors?

No, triangles make for horrible grids. Just think about the diagonals on them. They might be amusing as a novelty, but as a serious grid? no thanks.

Wow, NGE doritos. Makes me wish i lived in japan. For those, having a triangle grid would be totally worth it.

  Couldn't we just toggle in-between overlays?  Doesn't seem complicated to me but then again, I'm not always the brightest light.  Sometimes just a dim bulb. The hexes were used extensively for miniature war gaming.  People enjoyed having flanking options which hexes provided.   Squares are limited in direction you face, but were used so heavily(cause it was easy) in underground/dungeon settings for people to make maps with.

  Everyone who wargamed or rpg'd at one point has used a 1 square = 10'.  The advancements in pc gaming(which many wargamers/strategy enthusiasts migrated to) allowed for a complete circle or to face any direction you wanted without overlays.  Not sure if the flanking/rear attack bonuses have carried over through the years like they should have.  The gist of it all is I would like to see squares, hexes and no grids as options for the users in Elemental. 

 The attack/defense modifiers should be the same regardless of overlays.  Meaning, if you get attacked from rear whether your in hex/sq/cirlce/triangle/ or no overlay the modifiers should remain the same and not be based on the overlay just the relationship between the units and how they face each other.

Ok, didn't know tiles were tied to terrain or anything else.  I thought it was just a graphic for visuals.

Well considering that I remember a post about making the square's inside each square 3 by 3 for city building purposes (Which sounded and still sounds like a great idea worth the trouble and effort). Boogie came on and explained how much effort went into getting the 2 by 2 overlay done and after a bit of spiteful glaring at the code said 3 by 3 (Which still sounds like a great idea that should be considered for the neatness and reduced sprawl factor of cities regardless of how much work it will be and how much boogie must be consigning my soul to the farthest reaches of hell atm. ) wasn't in the cards.

I am thinking Hexes at this point is kind of a moot point.

I will post more later, but there are only THREE possible regular, simple polygon patterns that repeat evenly.

Triangles, squares, and hexes.

Triangles aren't intuitive so we use squares or hexes. We could do something wierd like sqaures + octogons, but that's not a simple one-shape repeating pattern.

I'll post more wierd stuff in a different thread just for fun. : )