Unit Cap

I was wondering what is the maximum unit cap going to be?

Overall, whatever the Server can Handle.

It terms of say ranked play, depends on what the 'standard' map sizes will be and will represent optimal gameplay.

Mike

Another big question I have is will bigger units cost more population? And will buildings count?

Personally I'm of the opinion that buildings which have an attack should cost population, and units should all cost 1, and you should always start with 0/1000 or whatever. You shouldn't have to build houses.

Since the unit cap exists for the sole purpose of not crashing the server, I guess any object you build will simply count as one. There's no real reason to go through with balancing that stuff, especially considering everything (including buildings) will need to cost at least 1, or the server can still get overstressed from someone spamming stuff that doesn't take up population.


Reminds me of a game of Zero-K where some guy built over 500 windmills. Spring did not like.

Good point. But I don't really ever want population to be maxed... I'd like to play games where its never an issue. Because when you hit pop cap, then you start a completely different type of game.

This and your previous post in this thread almost makes me think you never played TA/SupCom/FA, in FA I never hit the 1k unit cap unless I'm doing something stupid, like building T1 units out of 20 T3 factories.....

Mike

I played gobs of TA and quite a bit of FA. In a "normal" game, no you don't hit the cap. But in those games you dont have multiple planets or the scale that PA does... PA has such a big scale that I would be much more worried about hitting a unit cap.

Also, I did hit the cap in TA sometimes. Yes it was because of silly spam, but heck, silly spam is fun!

I'm just saying that I never want to hit caps, and I'm hoping the design of the game is such that caps can be set really really high...

Well, the game is built around scalability, so it's as I said before, as much as the server can handle in terms of custom and player hosted games.

Mike

The devs have stated they'd rather not set a hard limit to the unit cap. For scalability into the future.

I think the best mod for forged alliance was the "unit cap divided by 4" this is great for testing the speed of peoples computers.
Even though the game lags when the cpu is under 20% used, and only 7.6 gig of 32 gig rams is used. There is no doubt that successive generations of computers have increased performance in supcom. The power of your computer is going to play a significant part in PA as was the cause in FA.

I guess, in the alpha/beta stage a lot of benchmarking will go on, to test what the hardware side cap will be usable on your available machines.
I hope there will be half-way automatic game modes (aka AIvsAI), which would help testing the game/server at different scales.

I agree with you asgo on that. However I would guess that all the debugging and trace symbols will hinder performance.

Even it alpha/beta pledgers will get their versions without these symbols performance optimisation is a long journey so I wouldn't be surprised if the first alpha we get our hands on will handle only a thousand units or even less.

I don't know how Uber do the work but in business programming we prefer to leave optimisations near the end of the development cycle as it tends to make the code unreadable.

I used to hit the cap in TA every game but in SupCom never. Not having it at all would be magnificent but question is would the PCs of people handle such awesomeness?

Sure there would be 10 minute battles but what about those 2-3 hour battles that will most certainly happen, people will have to have good computers to handle that much data.

Or am I missing something

When running your own server (because the client doesn't care that much I believe), I would not be surprised if there was 3 "suggested" types of caps, "Recommended based on game size", "Max recommended based on server resources" and "What unit cap? There is no cap". The last meaning you kill the server if you over tax it and run out of ram.

I fully support this! Let all servers die to the awesomeness that shall be PA...

Stalemate by spam?

Hey, you're still annihilating something... Just happens to be something tangible rather than an army of robots...

I don't see how is this an issue, MAKE IT HAPPEN!

I foresee allot of servers dying in the first weeks of PA as people try to test them and brake them! to see how much they can really handle XD.

No cap is bad, very bad. Do you really want your game crashing, because that's what will happen when the server runs out of RAM?