Should there be a unit limit? People like to claim a planet and then setup 10 T1 factories and churn out T1 units with no end. With nobody to fight, the units just build up and up until the game bogs down. So I think there should be a limit per-planet. I think this limit should be controlled by something... (Note: Numbers are made up. We can debate the fine details.) Your Commander will come with, say, a 250 unit controller module that only works on the planet he is on. To increase this limit as well as go to other worlds, you can build: * Orbital Control ship. Slow moving. Hard to kill but lightly armed. +100 units for the planet it's orbiting. * Ground Control Facility. Tough building, no weapons, expensive and large, +100 units for the planet. Orbital control ships give you reach and are cheap but are easily destroyed by sudden fighter incursions. Ground facilities give you more reliable control and are harder to kill but take up a lot more space and are expensive. Technically you can still spam T1 units but you'll be forced to think about it. Do you REALLY want another 100 dox sitting around? Or would you maybe rather build a Halley somewhere or a nuke? When you hit your unit limit, factories simply go on pause. If you lose a control item (your commander moves to another planet or something blows up), same deal -- factories just go on pause until the limit allows them to start working again. "Spawn more overlords." I would love to have a game with no unit limits but at this point I feel it's safe to say that T1 unit spam will always be a problem until we implement something to prevent it. Like unit limits.
really, I already made a mod that reduces unit numbers by quadrupling their cost and armor. That way, less units do more. I am thinking of working some more on it, but I almost want to fall away from vanilla and dumb down units.
The game engines does support unit caps, as far as I know. It is just currently set to maximum (propably around 2^64). The kickstarter page mentioned being able to set a unit limit per game, I asume we see it around offline mode release (it is something you want to define based on the server). Not so sure about making it based on planets. Just classical tracking based on player/team might be better. Population is one of the classical resources of RTS games: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouRequireMoreVespeneGas And the other two resorces (gold and power) are already shared between planets. At the very least there should be mod support for this. i.e., there needs to be an "absolute limit" (whatever the server can handle) and a softcap based on current support units/buildings.
My suspicion is that 200 units per planet on 5 planets would perform far better than 1000 units on a single planet, which is why I'm thinking a per-planet limit might be better. My feeling is that the problem comes from the efforts of units to organize themselves and handle pathing and this is the worst if you are creating hundreds of units going to the same exit point on a single planet. The more you spread them around, the less problem it creates.
I see two issues with putting it on a "per planet" level: 1. The two other resources are based on system. There is no seperation of planet 2. Since it only affects Factories, Teleproters could easily break the limit. Got a 200 unit cap on that planet? Just have 200 units there, reinforce via teleporters. No more unit limit in the way.
Why are you suggesting a unit limit based on how good ubers server are? We know their servers aren't great, but to purposely limit the entire game based on that is just downright criminal.
True -- we'd have to put teleporters and transports on the same limit. Teleporter stops working if the target planet is over the limit and units in orbital transports can't land. (I wonder, now, how well 2000 orbital units would perform compared to 2000 ground units. If my theory is correct, ground units are the problem and orbital units may not need to be included in the limit.) I'm just tired of games that bog down due to T1 spam -- and usually it's not a result of combat but rather, someone on an uncontested world just spewing T1 units that they'll never use for no reason. They may well lose the game just for the amount of metal they're wasting on useless units but it'll take 2 hours because the game is running so slow.
It's the result of few server resources being devoted to each game, so uber could have many games of lower quality playing at once, rather then having to wait 30 minutes for a higher quality server to open up, and then to be instantly taken by another lobby.
Calling a unit cap criminal is a bit much hyperbole. Unit caps - population limits - have always been about nothing but preserving resources. Specifically RAM, AI cycles and auto-targetting cycles. As I understand it there will be a setable limit. If you don't like that, just leave it on max. But people who think that 10k units per player are quite enough can still enable it for thier servers. It would be an option, not a requirement. Not with one word did I say Uber should place unit limtis on thier servers. And in the end that is thier decision to make, not ours. It cannot be modded if the game engine does not support it in the first place.
And, for my purposes, I would need the engine to support per-planet limits. Another option might be something TA supported, which was per unit limits. You could start a game that limits all T1 units to, say, 200 each, but has no limit on anything else. That would take some user interface work...
Or..or, we can get uber to hurry up with the Unit Cannon so these 1000's of units have somewhere to launch and fly off to and invade peoples.
I think that cannon is a lot more complicated then anticipiated. And propably has a pretty low priority accordingly.
I'd say a player limit which is default on unlimited and has settings for server lobbies for people that want it. I'll probably never use it since I find Uber's servers awesome and almost never have big problems with them.
