Straight Scoop on Diagonals

What is Legal, What is Not and Where to Score a Dime in Cali Now...

By: George Argyropoulos

a/k/a Dragon_Bane   

Since the OP9 upgrade, several players have noted that there have been bases in which 'diagonals' have been used for land tile placement. I had the opportunity to sit down with a developer last week to look at this issue, the underlying mechanic and to get a clearer understanding of what happened, what was legal and what was planned for the correction.

So, to begin with, what is a 'diagonal'? It is when you place land tiles corner to corner in your base. The following is a legal configuration of corner to corner placement:

This has been legal in the game since I started playing in 2011. Back then it had a very niche use and honestly, due to the limitations of its use, I can not see a viable use for it in today's game other than for aesthetics. What was not ever allowed was the 'building' off of those diagonals as illustrated below:

The issue arose from the OP9 update deploy and the larger base footprint that update allowed. Within the new expanded areas, illegal configurations such as the one illustrated above could be performed, but only in the newly expanded areas. The base planner worked properly in the old base area. The pictures below should help illustrate this:

As you can see, in the old base areas the attempt to build off of the diagonal is illustrated and marked properly in red, however, in the expanded areas, they are not.

That all said, the biggest issue the developers faced was the automated hacking detection programs that they run. One thing that is in the algorithm to detect is the illegal building off of a diagonal. This is a problem since the base planner currently allows the illegal placement in the game.

What the Development team at Kixeye is attempting to do is avoid improper bans by implementing something similar to the correction for square bases - if the base layout is illegal you will be prevented from launching fleets or leave your base until it is corrected.

This is the tentative plan and I applaud the forethought in this correction so that people are not banned for something that is, by all rights, a bit of an obscure mechanic rule that very few were familiar with. I hope this clears up any lingering questions.