Jon Mavor's interview for Redbull.com/uk

4096 is the estimated theoretical unit limit (likely buildings + units) per map for Starcraft 2, as calculated by fans. Whether there are enough resources to build that many units or even enough space in the map to fit them is a different question.

The max units possible in Starcraft 2 ignoring the map unit limit and existing map resources I would calculate as 16 x 200 x 2 (max players * max player resources * zerglings) = 6400, so it's possible to hit that limit on a custom map.

You could also just build 4096 overlords...

So then... is the unit number accurate on the ctrl+p overlay? Cause it would mean I allready had games with over 4k units that ran pretty smooth, beating SC2 allready.

Yes, that number should be a fairly accurate representation of the unit count. Note: "units" in the PA engine are both the buildings and the bots, tanks, airplanes, etc. Internally the only real difference between structures and your army is one has the option to navigate (ie: move) and one does not.

Somehow I missed the June 28th stream, which was linked in the article, but there were 2 back to back questions about the same thing with opposite answers (at around 28:30).

The 1st one asked about if we'd be able to move celestial bodies and Jon said no. He then mentioned how there was thought about being able to smash asteroids into planets, but he was thinking of disabling that.

The next question asked about methods for moving asteroid around. For this one Jon replied that his goal was to be able to modify orbits and smash things into each other. This is more in line with the original trailer and I know I've heard Jon talking about smashing asteroids into planets many times.

Was the answer to the 1st question just a miscommunication? It's also been a while since that stream, so it's possible things have changed. I'm just hoping that they haven't changed in a way that there are no more asteroids crashing into planets.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not at all reading into current performance. This was just to emphasize that before considering to have this game running on current ipdad/android hardware, the game had to be optimized on PC (Am' wrong to say that scalability is also to be considered at the operating system layer and not only hardware ?).
I trust you when you say performance can be drastically increased and that the current state is far away from what final release will offer.

One question though : I read many times in hardware specialized magazines that using a graphic card with more than 2gigs of memory is useless if one is not playing with a higher resolution than 1920x1200. most of them state it's only relevant for higher resolutions. But as far as i understood the more memory the graphic card has, the better it will be for PA performance. Is that true ?

The two specific questions were "would be able to move any celestial body including planets and stars" and "will there be other ways to maneuver asteroids besides just building engines on them, moving one into orbit of an enemy planet for instance".

The answer to the first question is essentially no, making the assumption of this being during gameplay. Note that we hadn't talked about or shown off the system editor when that video was released, in fact it didn't even exist yet. We don't have plans for smashing planets in to a star and having the star wobble for instance, and we don't really have plans for having people move planets around to smash into each other as part of normal gameplay. Asteroids and small moons, yes, larger planets if someone really wants to cover the surface with engines they can but in general it's just not going to be that useful.

His comment about disabling something was in reference to modifying a planet's orbit when smashed into by an asteroid, not disabling smashing asteroids into planets.

The second question was specifically about asteroids, and we want those flying all around space, though I think Mavor misinterpreted the question slightly. I think the person was asking if they would be able to cause an asteroid to be catapulted by the gravity of a passing planet, which we showed happening in the original kickstarter video, but I don't think we have a precise answer for. At this time we don't have plans to do "n body simulation", ie: planets or asteroids in orbit will just keep to their existing orbit even if they pass into gravitational proximity to each other. However a small moon or asteroid being moved by thrusters may react to the gravity of other planets.

Cool, thanks for clarifying. I figured there was either a miscommunication, misinterpretation of the question, or thing have simply changed since then.