Scale?

[Sir Ritalin]

I don't think Dave was offended.

[turin]

HAPMA, you fools! HAPMA!!!

[Glowing Fish]

Of course, no one knows, and they can be about any size, but my impression is that they are around 100-600 yards across.

Besides, of course, in scenarios where people hear other people whispering on the other side of the battle field!

[Weeksy]

hexes can be both 10 feet and 100 miles across, at the same time. Forests aren't really shaped like hexagons, villages aren't houses, and people aren't pixellated units in a computer game. Wesnoth is not real life, and as such doesn't need to be bound by such real things as physics, the shape of things, or even ideas such as time always happening at the same speed. The only real rules that we know govern their world are laid out in the game client, everything else is up to your imaginations. Use them.[/i]

[Samantha]

hexes can be both 10 feet and 100 miles across, at the same time. Forests aren't really shaped like hexagons, villages aren't houses, and people aren't pixellated units in a computer game.

I'm sorry, Weeksy. But your last comment was offensive and deeply hurtful to the pixellated community.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

hexes can be both 10 feet and 100 miles across, at the same time. Forests aren't really shaped like hexagons, villages aren't houses, and people aren't pixellated units in a computer game.

I'm sorry, Weeksy. But your last comment was offensive and deeply hurtful to the pixellated community.

Agreed. We need to calm down, before people start insulting each other's depth of color palette...or worse, how isometric their perspective is.

[irrevenant]

In Wesnoth units of space and time are both amorphous. Not only can they be different sizes, they can be different sizes simultaneously.

A turn is half the length of daylight, half the length of night, and exactly the length of both dawn and dusk. On average that's 6 hours, but dawn and dusk are nowhere near 6 hours long, and in a European climate like Wesnoths it would be odd for the night to be 12 hours long. So a turn ranges from 1 hour to maybe 8 hours in length. Yet a spearman walks the same distance in the first turn as the second.

Similarly, a hex is miles across (it must be if it takes a spearman over an hour to walk it), yet so small that only one unit can fit in it at a time.

Wesnoth doesn't have a scale: it has multiple scales simultaneously. Weird, but that's how it is.

Or, as Dave put much more succinctly: It's an abstraction.

[turin]

It's also no different from most other strategy games - the scale of a game like Starcraft, when you think about it, makes just as little sense as Wesnoth's.

[Federalist marshal]

From what I am surmising from this thread (which I am beginning to regret starting), the abstract nature of Wesnoth prevents any form of solid scale being developed.
And by now we can all agree that the abstract nature of Wesnoth is one of the reasons why its so fun, right?

[VThornheart]

Don't regret starting it Marshal! I think it's a good subject. As you've seen, it means many different things to many different people (or nothing at all to some).

I think it was interesting to see the range of beliefs in regards to the scale and what it means for the game. It's by no means something to regret bringing up, and definitely nothing for anyone to get angry at you about (though if it helps, I think it might have only seemed like people were angry with you when in fact they were just passionately stating their belief/opinion: text, as I've so often said, is a poor form of communication for intent and emotions.)

[CarpeGuitarrem]

My pixels feel insulted and unimportant.

[Velensk]

I don't think the abstracted scale alters the fun value, but I do think it offers great flexability to what you can represent in a senario, In the final lvl of the HTTT you can represent a elite regiment of dwarves (around 500 people) with your dwarven lord that probably represented a small but powerfull warparty (maybe 20 people) in the caves.

[irrevenant]

This is one of a few topics that keeps coming up.

Maybe a Wesnoth FAQ (linked from the webpage, not just as a sticky) is warranted?

[Mithridates]

Does this mean that Wesnoth is actually a highly complex quantum entanglement?
This would explain why it is impossible to determine anything about it for certain as the entanglement collapses when it is measured, and you realise that Wesnoth is just an illusion....