Friendly Fire

How much RAM do you have in your box?

that.

A difficult question.
Pro:

• Complete simulation requires friendly fire for everything.
• There are actual situations when hitting your own units brings advantage on the battlefield, for example, nuking overwhelming enemy forces locked in combat with your vanguard.

Contra:

• Most technologically advanced weapons have IFF and other means of protection ensuring it will never hit the wrong target.
• Placing defences that can occasionally hit each other is a pain. There are no good solutions to that problem, and even mediocre ones require full terraforming toolset.
• There are griefing by friendly fire. Sad but true.
• Most importantly, friendly fire without really smart unit formations AI often causes unit group to shoot its forward lines instead of enemy. Avoiding that requires tons of micromanagement.

Overall:
I think that friendly fire for anything smaller than strategic weapons (maybe, including heavy artillery) will not contribute to gameplay right now. Controlling its side effects require levels of gameplay automation far beyond current scope of the project.

Why would an occasional friendly fire hit be a pain? If it only happens rarely it isn't really a problem unless the turrets kill each other in 1 shot.

Units should avoid firing if they would hit a friendly unit standing infront of them. That is how it is done in the Spring engine.

Friendly fire/occlusion flat out fixes the Jethro and most direct line AA. If that's not good enough to include it, then nothing is.

yup, fixes gunship-deathballs as well. the only con IMO is direct fire unit formations

How? All you do is shoot down.

they have to space out to not fire into each other? unless the gun is outside of the unit's hitbox

I think they do spread out against non-moving targets anyway?

But I do see what you mean.

And with the aircraft ammo system that they are suggesting it begs the question of how gunships will be handled.

I'm curious about gunships too. Bombers could work as shock and sniping while gunships work as area control and harassment.

Um, lets assume I don't have the Titan in my home office... What is a realistic answer to my question?

Well you should really post your specs.
Wild speculations ensue:
For Zero-K which is one of the more demanding games on the Spring engine I'd say 1000 units for a singlecore machine with 2 gigs of Ram and some old GPU.
Another game like BA, NOTA or XTA might very well handle 2000-4000 units on the same computer.
Devs has just developed multithreaded version of the Spring engine but the games need to be compatible themselves to run on multithreaded Spring and it is very unclear how much performance you can gain on the multithreaded version.
Then devs have recently included new features which seems to increase the load on the CPU so its' really hard to if the realistic number of units will change over time as well.
That's open source for you.

You did not define "AoE". Wtf is AoE?

Are you being serious? I hope not. "AoE" stands for "Age of Empires".

Area of Effect, so like splash damage weapons.

I'm very much in favor of full friendly fire implementation. I think it can stimulate clever tactical thinking in battles considerably (and that's fun), without descending into micromanagement frenzy. And also aid immersion a lot.

The babysitting issue can be solved if Uber makes artillery AI that doesn't senselessly bombard friendly units, and if players don't senselessly place direct-fire units in the rear so they can't shoot. (Putting long-range direct-fire units up on a tall hill in the rear isn't senseless, that's clever.)

The griefing issue can be solved by displaying each player's hostile/friendly kill ratio in the lobby, so you can avoid teaming up with unreliable players who have a history of griefing or gross incompetence.

Thanks god.