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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> How big do you think a single square in civ takes up?

On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.)

Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)

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That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.

Part of the abstraction of the game is that the map for cities and the map for units are at different scales (despite being the same map), and scales change depending on what year you’re in

> That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.

Well, if we are talking about games where the size of a square is a coherent question, they can only do that in Civ III; Civ 1/2 units have only attack/defense, units with weapons "better range" just goes into the attack/defense abstraction, whereas in Civ IV archery units get first strike, and artillery units damage city defenses, but, like all other units that can attack at all, they can attack only adjacent units. (Even the single use missile units in Civ 4 are just units with a lot of movement that are destroyed when they attack, not ones that have a "range" capability distinct from movement.)

Range units came back with Civ V, along with the introduction of hexes and the elimination of stacks.

> Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference.

This would make no sense; the top and bottom of the map are always land that blocks you from going that way. If you assume that you're on a spherical Earth, you also need to assume that the regions around the north and south pole don't appear on the ingame map.

I agree that the assumption makes no sense, but the calculation offering an 80mi diameter elsewhere in the thread is, in fact, based on distributing the Earth's land area across the number of tiles in a (Civ 6 huge, IIRC) map, calculating the area of each tile based on that, and then calculating the distance across the tile based on the area.

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