[espadrine]

> why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback.

Would a game of chess be any better if it featured pixel-sized cells and real distances? Some games, especially turn-based, are more fun with a limited number of acceptable actions, because they require you to think in a certain way in order to win. In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.

That said, Rise of Nations might be for you, if that is what you are looking for.

[vacri]

Well, I already mentioned that the placement of cities is largely meaningless in Civ 5 anyway. Unless you're putting them right next to barren land, they're all pretty similar.

Keep in mind also that chess is an extremely abstract version of combat, whereas Civ is trying to emulate civilisations. Likewise, chess has six different kinds of pieces, all of which play very differently. Civ effectively has three: 'ranged unit', 'melee unit', and 'air unit', without much difference between ranged and melee. There simply isn't the scope for clever arrangement or movement of pieces like in chess - civ combat is more simplistic like checkers... a game which very few people enthuse about.

[PavlovsCat]

> In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.

When we recognize patterns, like, when we throw a ball at a moving target, we don't consciously analyze things, but that doesn't make it "hand-wavy". With a more complex map, it might take longer to develop an "intuition" for it, but that doesn't mean there are not a lot of complex and somewhat precise "calculations" going on, it's just that we're not that aware of all of them.