The Free Thinking

In this page, I explore the most out-of-the-box ideas I have to see if they are feasible enough to implement. Some of these ideas are just waaay to crazy to go for, but I would still need to formulate them to understand why they are too crazy, or perhaps why they are simply crazy enough.

### Path of Relativity / Time dilation

The concept of Time Dilation is that time passes at different rates depending on your speed and on the gravitational pull on you. The movie Interstellar portrays this excellently when the main character spends a few hours on a planet near a black hole, and during those hours, over 20 years pass on Earth, and his children grow up. This is a concept which is truly fascinating, but generally requires vast amounts of space. I cannot see it working in any other mode than single player, but what would happen if players further away from the universe pillar will basically perform 2 turns in the same time that a player standing inside the pillar will perform 1 turn? You would never really have to display anything else than integers, but every once in a while, you skip your opponents' turns or they skip yours.

### Creating space outside the universe

What if you could designate an off-world coordinate and populate it? How to get there is definitely a good question. The wrap-around-world automatically translates such coordinates into world coordinates, but what if this hex was added to the world in such a way that it didn't even try to re-evaluate it? Let's say the world has a radius of 10. Then no coordinate would have an absolute value of more than 10. What if, in this world, you defined a hex at the coordinate (40,-20,-20)? Far away so that is cannot be seen unless you move there. This would pose the problem of what hexes are adjacent to that hex though. Those coordinates would be translated into world coordinates, and suddenly you would have an alternate hex with the same neighbours as an actual hex. From those hexes, the special hex would never be visible, though. Have I just invented a physical hex portal?

### Expanding space / stretch out the heavens

If the weakening of the universe pillar would have the effect of a shrinking universe, would the opposite also be true? That if you were to boost the universe pillar, the space itself would expand and allow more hexes to be created? Perhaps.

### Time Travel

How would this look? As long as it is a single-player game, you could technically save the world state every turn and then, at some point, load that state but insert yourself in your current form as a brand new player. That would allow you to play in parallel to yourself. The question is what happens when you start to interfere with your other self. One thought is that whatever you do, the other you also does, so that your mind is actually controlling 2 units simultaneously. Or that, since your mind is now in another body, the old self falls into the hands of an AI. In any case, what happens when you again reach the time where your old self is supposed to go back in time like you did? If your old self doesn't do it, is that Game Over then? But if you control both, and make sure to go back in time, then you are yourself stuck in a loop where you will never really get past the time of the first travel back in time. What if the AI tried its hardest to follow the already played path. If it is obstructed, it still tries to reach the same status as recorded, but in other ways. In that way, he could still want to perform the time travel, and the new you could live on if he succeeds.

The real problem comes with the Multiplayer aspect of the game though. Time skip would remove the player from the game temporarily until he exits the time jump, but that experience would likely be of little use and a lot of downtime. It could be used to disappear from a dangerous situation and let the enemies scatter before reappearing in the same place 2 days later, but other than that I see little usage for such an effect. What if you jump back in time? In Multiplayer, we could of course have one of the players being fed old data to his view to make his moves that way. Let's say he actually can move around based on this old data, and whatever he does affects the real-time opponent the same way. In that way, it doesn't really matter if you were hurt 2 days ago or today, the damage is equally real. In that case, a player might get hurt without seeing anyone, since they are hurting their past selves and not the current one. It would be more like the realization that... hey, didn't someone hit me just a couple of days ago? Why don't I remember that? Also pushing and moving units would be performed in both cases.

Would a player who travels back in time be stuck in an eternal state 2 days behind the others? That seems to give enormous benefits, as they would likely never see him move. Instead, I would suspect we make the time catch up faster for that player until he reaches the now. Let's say time goes twice as fast for time travellers until they catch up to the now. This would allow them to do time raids, but would not allow them to be obfuscated forever.

### Sabbath

What if something special were to happen every 7 turns? Like, for example, 1 extra income of power, due to resting. Or, all cards in your deck cooldown once. Or something. Why? Well, to follow the best example, of course :) This would imply 24-hour-day time units, and right now the time unit is not defined. If we want a material world where units build houses etc, then 1-day time units is not good, the week itself would be better, but the Armageddon system uses months or even years.