How big a planet can be in PA's planet generator?

The size of the slider in the earlier live stream doesn't mean anything, those were just the random numbers chosen when the UI was put together based off of the equally random numbers put in to the test the original planet generation code.

Planet size is limited by the RAM available, but we don't yet know how big we can go with in specific memory amount.

The point is very big planets can work if we include fast things in addition to having common units that are, in strategic terms, quite slow with respect to such a large planet. Where these units might be independently mobile on a smaller planet, they may require transportation to be strategically mobile on a much larger planet.

It might make sense to have these fast transports be orbital units. Who says an interplanetary transport is only useful for transit between planets? Why not also for fast transit from one point on the surface to another?

It might also mean that air units in general, including air transports, could be very fast compared to "realistic" modern air unit speeds. Land and air units' speed differential might easily be exaggerated for gameplay reasons, making land deployments less strategically mobile without air transport.

Thing is, Ledarsi, that the TA / Supcom style games aren't geared towards large maps, and it's very hard for people to visualize the next step up in scale.

As I've said before, Supcom couldn't handle big maps - the game design itself falls apart in maps larger than 20x20. PA is likely to suffer from the same issue - but this less a bug than a feature.

Perhaps in the future, as game rigs get more powerful and PA scales up even more, we will be able to see that goal of a map that is even just a large fraction of Earth's size. But to play on it in a fun manner will require a whole level of gameplay above and beyond the standard TA battlefield.

Agreed, if anything with PA's focus on Multiple planets, moons and asteroids neatly sidesteps many of the issues with larger maps while still allowing for a larger scale overall.

Mike