Is there a case for limiting the number of planets?

There has been a big influx of new players which is great, but human nature being what it is, a lot of them are making systems with 7+ planets in them. There is IMO no gameplay reason to have more than 4, and most importantly any more than that kills performance.

We don't want people playing PA once and deciding it's too damn slow and telling all their friends that, so how about a soft limit on the number of planets in a system? Similar to how planet radius is limited to 1200, but you can over-ride it if you want.

Perhaps a warning that comes up if you try to place a fifth planet? Or the editor could even refuse to allow a fifth planet unless some option is tweaked in the menu? I don't propose making it impossible to make really big systems, just that the people making them have to make a bit of effort to do it, so that they are aware that performance will likely be quite poor.

Bad maps will be rejected.

This sort of problem solves itself. It does not need to be enforced.

I would say 6 is an optimum number - two main worlds, two moons apiece for nuke juggling.

More useful than a soft limit would be a rough "player capacity" estimate. For example, if you make a system with a single scale 2 or 3 planet, it might suggest 2-4 players. If players can be informed at map creation that their massive 10-planet system is literally unplayable, then they might be more readily encouraged to self-moderate.

I like this idea, just telling players in bold red below the planet generation, some bullets:

-This is a player generated planet system.
-This game uses more than 3 planets and may be lengthy to conclude.
-This game uses more than 5 planets and may have slow render times.

Something of that nature. At least if warned, it is their responsibility to click ready. If they click ready, fun is not had, and they come here complaining, I will simply ask them why they saw the planets displayed and still clicked ready?

The Realm just played on a 10 moon system, and it was actually a lot of fun. It isn't something to be done constantly, but the performance sucks so bad anyway, there really isn't even a difference from 2-3 planets to 11. What most of the new people don't realize is that multi "planets" is tough because of the stalemates.

This is just a side effect of players not having any context. Once players get a better grasp of what setups actually works they will start doing that more. If players keep making "bad" maps it could also mean that they're just having fun in the end.

As long as we have a good lobby that shows enough information so that we can pick servers with the the types/styles of maps we like I don't see a long term issue.

Mike