I watched the stream and it confused the **** out of me when they were trying to explain it. So they are adding a unit cap? But you have an option to turn it off. So basically the person with the better computer will win, as much as I would love to have as many units as I want I find it highly unbalanced as you can have a hardcore rig and just crash other players out of the game with sheer numbers. Now if I have said anything wrong in this post it's because I don't fully understand how they are doing it and I would like someone to explain it to me. Thanks.
No, the server sets the limit. Everybody adheres to the server. If the server has no limit, it will eventually crash.
The idea is that in the dark future your space computer will be able to handle more units. So whoever sets up whatever game you happen to join will set the unit cap at something reasonable to not crash the average PC. But later on when we have better machines we can set the unit cap higher. And if you don't like how the server is set up, you can search for one with a proper unit cap. Just like trying to find a good Counter Strike server back in the day.
I see, I did watch the stream at like 4 in the morning cause I'm from Aus, so yeah. I didn't quite understand it, thanks for verifying it for me :]
There will be unit cap. This cap is going to dynamically increase for each player as players got eliminated during the session. For example: game starts with 40 players. Each player starts with 500 unit cap. Unit cap increases as players get eliminated so when there are last 2 players left each of them has 10 000 unit cap. This is an example how it is going to be implemented.
Maybe in an offline game where it only affects you, but it's one thing to set the cap to 1M units, and another actually do it. You'll almost certainly crash if you try, and even if it doesn't there's still performance issues.
At some level the ratio between land and units gets silly anyway. If we can make the engine efficient enough the cap should be high enough that you don't hit it. Of course you may want a cap for gameplay reasons in some cases. No cap really just means we crash when we hit the cap instead of letting the game continue. There is always a cap because your resources are limited.
Like Neutrino said in the terms of a level cap for this game it will be determined by the memory you have in your system. They did say in the stream that you should be able to set a unit cap the the game wont have one by default. With them also saying that they will do a 64bit exe making the game 64bit accepting more than 4GB of memory on a 64bit os you can imagine how many units you will be able to have with 16+GB of memory at your system and games disposal. I havent seen many games that have taken the time to make a 64bit exe and the only one that I have played was the Crysis series which had bin32 and bin64 folders. these two folders related to the 32bit files to run the game and the 64bit but on the server it didnt matter if a player connected with a 32 or 64bit client accept when Punkbuster was involved which PB did not support 64bit.
Oh, of course, in most Supreme Commander (offline) games I don't get more than, say, 2000 units or so (on 81x81 maps), I think, but still, that's 1000 more than the maximum unit cap. The first thing I do with every single game that has a unit cap, is to download a trainer to remove it (or increase it to something that might as well be infinite). But it's 'easier' if there is also the option of no unit cap, no matter if I could set it to 2000 or 5000 or whatever number I'd never reach. I doubt I'd crash in offline games anyway. Actually, how does this game compare to Supreme Commander? As in, how good a PC do you need to play whatever the equivalent of 81x81 maps is here (I realise those don't really exist because you could theoretically generate a 999999999x999999999 map, but...)?
Say it to my little friend equipped with 4 E5-4650! Well eventually it will crash, but when - it depends from how powerful hosting server is
While the game hasn't been made yet as you know and we don't know how it will be compared to supreme commander other than better and more efficient, what we do know is that it will be better and more efficient, not to mention 64bit which allows for much more memory use, additionally during the live stream they mentioned multithreading a few times so my expectations of PA regarding this is "much better than SupCom". Also, a way I was thinking to mitigate the resources used when enormousness amounts of the same unit are made, think a thousand T1 bots in SupCom, that they are processed not entirely as individual units but kind of like a 'swarm' where as long as the units are controlled in a group or following a leader with orders that they use simplified pathfinding and other features to help reduce their system impact. I know in Star Ruler, active 3D pathfinding for numerous spacecraft can rapidly tax a system and slow the game. And i'm thinking that once somebody builds 1k of a unit type and they run it at a base they wouldn't mind as much them clipping through each other as they would mind a noticeable performance drop or weird unit collisions such as in Sup Com 1 when units try to path around each other and end up bumping for years.
I think a unit cap is definetly needed. It makes the game more clear and more intence/shorter since u cant just build an endless army over hours, what would be very boring
I think when you get close to system peak, units should start self destructing at random. Oh, but those death explosions need some extra memory space to work. I guess you'll need to have a few more units spontaneously die. Eventually, the memory problem will take care of itself.
Also things that could have impact on or act like a unit cap are friendly fire and per unit ressources required to move and shot or do special stuff as mentioned in the logistics thread.
Indeed. Basically, anything that has to be checked constantly in real time is a resource hog. This includes things like unit upkeep, logistics, and dealing with constant AoE. Even self repair can chew up some CPU time if half a million units have to do it. The fewer units that have these things, the better. Things that can be checked once in a while or under specific circumstances are easy to manage. Things that don't have to be checked at all are great.
I want my unit cap to be limited only by hardware. If it's 2^64 units, then I won't mind at all. But once we start introducing artificial unit caps, then it goes in the complete opposite direction of where this game should be going.
If you look at how much unit splendour games in the Total War series bring to the field, I can't wait to see how intense it gets when you dedicate a serious server to hosting a game.
1. The boringness in itself will stop players from that. 2. Intensity is already achieved by abundance of tools game provides players with. It isn't StarCraft with almost symmetrical balance and XX century-sized maps. It isn't PERIMETER with emphasis on terraforming and ground control. It's Planet Annihilation and its scale will be so huge that the unit cap will be a eyesore. It isn't a tactics gme like StarCraft. It's a (global) strategy.
What the Dev's have said is really promising, obviously there is an ultimate hardware limit, but letting us be stupid within that is exactly right. It would be nice if there was some kind of tool calculating roughly what limits your computer might start to struggle at so you can make an informed guess as to where to set caps, but I imagine making this would be hard and not a good use of resources. The Addition of 64 bit mode is invaluable and a major selling point for me, I've been thinking about buying more RAM for a while but hadn't seen a reason too. Maybe now I will double the 8GB to 16 for this game! It's great to have people making a game who know exactly what their community want, and where the genre should be going.
