Population Cap.

in supcom FA the fact you can produce units much faster then they are destroyed does not mean you are safe from being overrun ....at all.

I don't think those will be in.

Agreed. We have to find some sort of middle ground. Fortunately with PA, the sheer openness of the planets would help deal with this, as the more units you have, the more you will want to attempt flanking and whatnot. More units with specific roles and better balanced units in the future will help also.

B-b-b-ut you don't. There will always be a point where things blow up faster than they can be rebuilt. It's like, the most basic of math.

I wish my binder would blow up really fast when I'm studying matrixes

Yes, there will be a point... but when would said point be reached in a standard game if you doubled or tripled the healthpool of every unit without increasing its cost or build time.

By swinging it so far in that direction you don't get a slower pace... you get stagnation until that point of Destruction > Build rate occurs.

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Apologies for using a little hyperbole bob.

Not really. Currently battles last a few seconds and are only longer then that as it takes time for all units to get into reach of the enemy units. Increase the health of units tenfold and they'll still only last 20-30 seconds for units in a 1v1 situation to kill the others.

Btw. Just because some numbers thrown around in this thread were a bit ridiculous: I allready get usually over 2000-3000 units in a longer game and thats on a size 3 planet with a horrible UI that forces you to micromanage all your economy. With an improved UI (that we will get), better performance and multiple planets? Reaching 10-20k units sounds very reasonable.

I strongly oppose any sort of unit cap being mandated in the game. An option that players can toggle on is fine, but there should never be a strict limit mandated or by default. There is no reason to force players to build less than their computer can handle, unless agreed upon by the players.

Ehhhhh.... maybe. In theory. But you gotta push the numbers SO hard off the deep end that the discussion becomes stupid.

The situation we're seeing is that a vast majority of units kill any arbitrary enemy in a single hit. It's such a fast exchange that even the d-gun ends up questioning its own existence. Increasing the typical exchange to like... more than a single hit is a good start.

Game stagnation happens when teching and defending become more effective than attacking and expanding. It's a simple case of bad unit design.

Would you say we wouldn't have a stagnant game (strategically speaking) with the current breakneck speed of things, even with a full unit roster?

breakneck speed = stagnant ? I don't get it.

Strategically, yes.

I think what Nanolathe is trying to say (and please correct me if I am misrepresenting you) is that the range of options for strategic play are limited currently, not in the sense that you can't do things differently, but in the sense that doing things differently is not optimal, and therefore, he argues, things are stagnant strategically, even though there is a lot to click on. For example, if it is strategically optimal that all players need to build a majority of their units as ants to survive, you could have a game that is both fast paced and strategically stagnant.

However, even if that were true for this game, I fail to understand how this impacts the argument on a unit limit. The diversity of units will still be expanded and balance will still change. Those changes would address a strategically stagnant game, not a unit limit. And a unit limit should never be a way to balance a game strategically. I have played some of those games, they are almost always terrible.

Nah, not really. The overall speed of battle doesn't really change what can and can't be done between units. But you will see more "...really" moments like "single T2 artillery flattens base". Hard counters will feel it the most, since they get free reign until a proper answer is fielded.

I agree with what Nanolathe said the unit cap being a dev goal. It may seem unrealistic at the moment but don't forget that alpha and beta are in general filled with debug and trace symbols that slow things down (and also that these builds aren't very optimized on purpose because optimized code is often unreadable and hard to maintain).

Does anyone remember original Homeworld multiplayer/skirmish? There was a "disable unit cap" option or something like that and it worked pretty well because computer technologies get better and better (check Moore's law). And we're fortunately still some distance from the limits of the currently used tech.

yeeeeees Meeeeeeeee and yea it was pretty neat

the unit cap is not present because w/ 1000 units you fill only one planet or moon
to conquer an entire system you need something like, ... OVER 9000 combat units + engs+ structures

What is your basis for that?

Mike

sorry, but I remember that was write in gamepedia excluded freatures: unit capacity
but no unit capacity would be great

As somebody playing on a laptop, having the option to play games with restrictive unit caps would be very appreciated. It would be even more awesome if ranked ladder would include such game modes in the future.

Why not just play on smaller planets. Much better then restricting via a unit cap.