Map Scenario Categories In Download Windows
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@redrum said in Map Scenario Categories In Download Windows:
@Cernel Not a bad idea though I think that's probably a few too many categories.
So, even tho I personally don't like to mix up counterfactual with regular history, one may easily make an argument that the distinction is rather blurred (hard to defend against someone arguing that "Empire" or "World At War" are counterfactual) and, say, if you are searching for Cold War stuff, maybe it is better having all cold war scenarios together, in Late Modern, since they are very few.
So, this would be a possible alternative in which:
- Counterfactual are dropped into their own settings.
- Primeval, Ancient and Medieval are all packed together as "Antique" (which means not-modern).
This reduces the categories to only 9.
-Antique
270BC
270BC Variants
Feudal Japan
Age Of The Sturlungs
Ancient Times
Empire
Feudal Japan Warlords
First Punic War
Jurassic
Rome Total War
The Great Norther War
Total Ancient War-Early Modern
Civil War
Diplomacy
Napoleonic Empires
Caribbean Trade War
Domination
Blue vs Gray
The Great Northern War-World War 1
Great War
Battle of Jutland
Domination 1914 No Mans Land
1914-COW-Empires
Domination 1914 Blood And Steel
Domination 1914-Weltpolitik
New World Order 1915Lebowski-World War 2
Big World
New World Order
The Pact of Steel
The Rising Sun
Total World War
World At War
World War II... (x9)
Big World 2
Pacific Challenge
Red Sun Over China
Ultimate World
Arnhem
Atari
Big World Variations
Classic Variations
D-Day
D-Day2
Eastern Front
Europe
Global 1940 Redesign HouseRules
Global War
Global War2
Iron War
New World Order Lebowski Edition
NWO Variants
Pacific
Pact of Steel Variations
Ultimate World Variants
World At War Variants
World War II Revised Variations
WW2 Philippines
WW2v3_11N
WW2v3_Variants-Late Modern
Cold War
Camp David
Cold War Asia1948
World War2010-Multi-Age
Age of Tribes-Futuristic
Star Trek Dilithium War
Star Wars Galactic War
Star Wars Tatooine War
Twilight Imperium
Stellar Forces
Invasion USA
Ur Quan War Masters Edition-Fantastic
Middle Earth
Battle of Aventurica
Dragon War
Greyhawk
Greyhawk Wars
Elemental Forces
Game of Thrones
Large Middle Earth
Steampunk
War of the Lance
War of the Relics
Zombieland-Abstract
Capture the Flag
MiniMap
Hex Globe10
Neuschwabenland
Tactics Campaign"Invasion USA" is Futuristic or Late Modern counterfactual? Anybody knows?
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@Cernel I am guessing by Fantastic you mean Fantasy?
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@prastle I mean fanciful. But maybe fantastic is too broad, as one may say that futuristic is fantastic too. Maybe "Fantasy" is better, but would the Iliad or a Steampunk or Zombies map in the modern era or even current time be well defined as "Fantasy", or is fantasy only something "antique" (that would require adding another category between fantasy and future)?
Anyways, if anyone has a better proposal for its name, this is the definition that was there since I made this topic:
Fantastic: purely fantasy maps, set anytime from contemporary backwards, as long as fantasy based (also old fantastic legends, like the Iliad Epic or the Arthurian cycle are fantasy, if primarily aimed at representing the legends themselves).
Meaning that is meant to represent anything from Angels&Devils before the creation of man to Zombies today.
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@Cernel fantasy is generally demons, monsters, lord of the rings etc.
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@Cernel also sorry. I never noticed the topic before. I think u are on the right track or have the right idea but perhaps to many categories as red said. Just offering an idea .
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Maybe better merging "Fantastic" and "Futuristic" into a single "Fictional" category?
It is sometimes hard to distinguish. Think about a setting in the future with gods, demons and magic.
That would bring down to 8 categories:
-Antique
-Early Modern
-World War 1
-World War 2
-Late Modern
-Multi-Age
-Fictional
-AbstractOpinions?
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But maybe fictional is too broad a concept? Should then "Cold War" and "World War2010" go in there too or stay in "Late Modern"? How about "Age of Tribes"? Do we want a "Counterfactual" category for these things or not? Is a counterfactual scenario a fictional one by definition or should fictional be 100% so, like D&D?
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@Cernel Seems like we are attempting to dramatically over-complicate this...
Seems to me you either stay with time periods or specific themes...
I really don't think we need to distinguish between "Historical" or "Counter-factual" as we have very few games that are truly historical or play out in a totally historical manner.... so really every single map is counterfactual. As I see it the only category that needs to be included outside of a time period is "Fantasy" and possibly "Sci-Fi" (just to separate those as they each target a very different demographic).
Categorization is supposed to simplify the selection process... not complicate it further. I believe the age old acronym is applicable here... KISS.
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@Hepps So you would list "Steampunk" in WW 1 and "Zombieland" in Late Modern or in Fantasy? Can fantasy be used as a label for not-antique fictions?
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@Cernel Personally I think that it matters about as much as the quandary of "Which came first the chicken or the egg?"
I think that if a scenario is designed to be in a time period that should be the prioritizing factor... so yes Steam Punk would go in WWI and Zombieland would go in Modern. I don't really understand what "Late Modern" is anyways... the names for periods should make more sense anyways.
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@Cernel ug Fantasy =its a fantasy...
But generally if your in a library it refers to dragons elves etc or FANTASY! thus zombies and dragons and unicorns are all fantasy. Think ur digging to deep here but up to u
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Since modern wars start in 1492, "Late Modern" would be here the after WW 2 part of it, till current. I'm open to other labels for the same, as well as "Early Modern". Only othen one I can think of is Contemporary, but I don't quite like it much.
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@prastle said in Map Scenario Categories In Download Windows:
@Cernel ug Fantasy =its a fantasy...
But generally if your in a library it refers to dragons elves etc or FANTASY! thus zombies and dragons and unicorns are all fantasy. Think ur digging to deep here but up to u
Ok, so you would put "Zombieland" in fantasy, while @Hepps would put it in Late Modern. I'm unsure, but I don't like the idea to have Zombieland beside the normal modern conflicts, so I was leaning for a category in which to put anything having really strong fictional elemets, even if set in a real and specific timeline.
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@Cernel The reason I say you use time period as the overall governing factor is that it makes it simple. Then you can keep the list based almost entirely on time frames (with the exception of Fantasy & Sci-Fi) and not have to have maps listed in duplicate locations. All maps have a description which details whether it is a "historically" based scenario or whether it is "Fantastical" in nature. So if you keep everything in a specific time period then it is easy.
I say this because I really don't see a difference in how modern games like: Cold War, where the nations of the world are nuking each other, verses Zombieland where America that if fighting a zombie apocalypse, are any more or less fictional comparitively. Both are wildly fictitious and the only common theme is the time period. A category like Fantasy (to me) is purely for games that have no relation to the real world... ie. Game of Thrones, Middle Earth, War of the Lance... things that are truly unrelated to Earths history... real or alternate. -
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Probably would be pretty helpful, though I don't know if its necessary to divy up the maps chronologically by era with that much detail. Especially if half of them are set in WW2. Still I like the idea of more information provided by the categories.
Also, while we are on the subject...
I think the qualitative categories we have currently are kind of rough. They seem sort of subjective, like who is the arbitor quality, and what criteria is used for deciding what is high quality or low quality or whatever? I think categories like "Most Popular" or "Unfinished" might be more useful, or at least easier to assess/defend objectively.
It's nice to have a way to dump defunct or poorly designed games into a category where they aren't being showcased front and center, but the descriptions we have now don't provide a whole lot of info explaining what determines the various gradations of quality.
Perhaps something describing gameplay-scale (ie. size/length of an average game) or how old it is, would be helpful in a category breakdown too? Maybe we should start putting some dates in the game notes, so people can see which maps are more recent vs old as dirt. Or to see popularity over time. Things like that.
Or if all that is too much effort another approach might just be to do like an Editor's Choice, Fan Favorites or Top Picks type thing. Maybe a periodic review of the entire catalog would be nice. Even if it's just a separate article.
But yeah, I like the idea of more info. I think it would be good to start with maybe half a dozen chronology/era based categories.
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Good feedback/discussion. From a dev and admin perspective a couple questions to answer:
- How to manage the data?
- How to handle the UI?
To clarify a bit and also to jump to my point. 3 layers of tabbing for categories is overwhelming for a UI. 2 layers is already a bit much, but I think mostly works for us. Regardless it still sometimes would have been nice at times to see all maps in one list (I've hunted for specific maps before and it took a few tab clicks to find the right category).
So, I think we can only really long term support 1 level of tabbing, the 'installed', 'to-update', and 'available' tabs.
Shifting approach a bit, we could define 'tags' for each maps. For example there could be a "category" tag, an "era" tag, a "is in testing" tag and so on. At the bottom of the download screen we can add drop down lists so that someone could filter between the options. It would actually not be too much trouble to make this free-form, what set of tags we define in map download config are the set that UI would render. It may be better though to keep it to the one or two really useful filtering options and pre-define a limited number of tags such as "era" and "quality". 'Author' would be a good candidate for another tag.
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@Cernel
I would avoid using terms like early modern and late modern for the same reasons most other games would avoid them. Gamers and normal people are not historians. Modern, in many people's minds, mean now or close to now, not 1492 or something like that. Based on what I see in other games, I would divide time periods into something like:Prehistoric
Ancient (Could be excluded and go direct to classical)
Classical
Medieval
Colonial (or Renaissance)
Industrial
WW1
WW2
Modern
Sci-fi
Fantasy -
I have been categorizing scenarios on my wiki for a while category list. Any 1-dimensional category system will not do a good job of classifying scenarios. That being said, your best bet as a purely time-based system, separating out scenarios with no particular time, but including hypothetical or even fantastical scenarios that have a particular year (such as the Great Steampunk War). For the range of years see timeline.
I would suggest the following broad categories
Ancient to 476AD
Medieval 477 to 1492
Gunpowder 1493 to 1903
World War 1 1904 to 1932
World War 2 1933 to 1945
Modern 1946 on
Other No specified date or far future -
@Frostion To me using "Modern" to mean after WW2 is absolutely unacceptable, as the Reinassance is in my mind the start of modernity, and considering the time of Leonardo etc. anything else but modern makes no sense to me.
I think "Late Modern" is fine, as 1945 onwards is very late in modernity, and it is really the last small fraction of modernity, but I don't like it very much, either, as I would prefer something defined in itself, instead of late-part-of-something.
I don't like "Contemporary" that much, either, for the opposite reason, as I don't really think to the Korean War as something "contemporary".
But definitely would prefer "Contemporary" over "Modern" for 1945 onwards.
If we don't use "Late Modern", then there is also the issue of how we call the "Early Modern", as we would need a definition for something going from the XV to the early XX century (we really don't want to split that up, obviously).
I don't like "Gunpowder" as a definition for it, but it is fairly good covering, except that it would leave us not covered if somebody makes a map about the Russo-Japanese War, for example, that we can't classify as WWI; so we would then need another age between "Gunpowder" and "WW1", but that would be very marginal.
So we need something that can go from the XV century till 1914 there. I can't think of anything else but "Early Modern", tho admittedly that is a bit of a stretch, as with the French Revolution modernity gets out of the truly early phase.So, to sum it up:
- If "Late Modern" is not nice to most for 1945 onwards, then I would say "Contemporary", even tho I don't really like it much.
- But, if so, then we need of a good single alternative to "Early Modern" for 1500 to 1900, and I really don't like "Gunpowder" (tho it is fairly good telling).
Anyways, it all depends if the developers want to make scenarios for the download list (I think it would be quite helpful and neat) or it's all a moot point.
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