Allow for 4 player map without hyperlane tiles

[alucardu]

It would be nice to be able to generate a Milty draft without the use of hyperlane tiles. Or is that not possible because without hyperlanes a 4 player map has tiles between the players slices (which cannot be accounted for when using Milty draft).

[healsjnr]

I've only just started using this tool, I really love it, the only pain is we play with a relative new group of 4 and the hyperlane setup feels tight (particularly for new players). As a result for each game we've played, I ended up using the draft tool, then customising the layout into something like this format: https://keeganw.github.io/ti4/?settings=F60005551FFF&tiles=18,66,37,49,40,42,46,24,43,21,38,34,83A-0,61,69,48,63,20,83A-0,54,33,46,79,15,45,85A-5,31,50,7,65,47,35,56,64,85A-2,27,67

The key points are:

• The top right and bottom left home planets and outer adjacent tiles are rotated one one hex clockwise
• A Space tile is inserted into the gap this creates
• The diagnoal running from top left to bottom right is replaced with: Curved Hyperlane, Random Planet, Space, (MR), Space, Random Planet, Curved Hyperlane
• Along side that diagonal
  • The hex clockwise from the Curved hyperlane is another Random Planet
  • The hex clockwise from the Random Planet is a Straight Hyperlane

We've played a few games with this now and it seems to work pretty well. It gives a bit more space and breathing room for friendly games (at the potential cost of a longer game).

I'd love it we could have an option for 4 players maps to use this late so that I didn't have to manually create them each time. How would you feel if I had a crack at adding this and opened a PR?

[shenanigans-be]

@healsjnr Of course! Be my guest :)

You'll wanna look at generate-map.js for most of this — the hex coordinate/tile-naming system is a little sloppy but not impossible to get your head around — and the draft tab is already (kind of) set up to allow for alternative layouts (it now only has the default hyperlanes mode and the individual tile mode, so this version would be a third option; but only whenever there's exactly 4 players).

I'd suggest leaving the extra 'random planet' tiles blank instead of trying to automatically fill them in. That clearly indicates to the players that they need to fill them themselves in with undrafted tiles and leaves it up to individual groups how exactly they want to do that (maybe have a seperate mini-draft or whatever), I've tried to keep the tool as un-opinionated as possible since everyone tends to have their own way of doing things 😅