Using only the portion of a giant planet.

It's more for mod possibilities. Will it be possible to make up to Earth-sized planets, but then only use a small portion of it for the actual game? So the entire planet wouldn't have to be simulated in detail, the pathfinder wouldn't have to search too far for paths...

This would be great, as it would allow for more traditional mods with near-flat maps and realistic scales, but while including orbital or even intercontinental or interplanetary elements (if only for non-player-controlled units).

I'm sorry but that doesn't really make sense to me. Having more than one planet, but only being able to only partially use one seems strange. If you want, lets say, an Europe map, just wrap Europe around the planet, rather than the entire world.

The dev's said the game will be scalable, so if you have a powerful enough computer you will be able to run an earth planet at a pretty decent size. going for the actual realistic scale is just insanity XD.

You may also be surprised how much a change of scale can change the feel of the game. Since the dev's went with the cartoony style, which makes a lot of sense, it can really look off, when on a realistically scaled planet.

I dont now for 40 person matches an Earth Sized planet and a similar moon could create a very interesting game. However i would say the largest planet that they should use in size would be Mars, a bit smaller than earth as to maintain the flat idea but insure the planet isnt so overly big games take months.

Or they could let us make games where the planet is so large games take months XD who care's if you never finish it, could you imagine the size of that!? it'd be like... PLAYING ON A WHOLE PLANET!

Just pointing out that no limits is way better than limits of any kind, and Uber's already confirmed the only limits are what'll melt your host computer

may be strange, but also one of the basics of scifi:
a planet often is just a singular point of interest with its immediate surrounding area.

probably also the reason why single terrain planets are so common, if you don't see much beyond a few square miles it doesn't matter if a swamp/ice/desert planet consists of just 5 or 95% of that terrain type.

I guess it makes sense in that light, but it would also be weird / difficult to implement. If you can orbit the planet, I don't see an easy way of scaling down into just a small area while the entire engine's being built to do the whole planet. You might be able to imply this by making a flat map, then making the rest of the planet in some terrain that restricts you enough you'd stay on the flat area, but I don't see anyone really doing that.

I imagine there will be some form of impassable and/or indestructible (excepting KEWs) terrain so map-makers can force bottlenecks in to their maps.

So if you absolutely must have a sphere with only a relatively small portion available for game-play you could fill the rest of it with that.
Although depending on what they do with aircraft, and almost certainly orbital units, they would be able to by-pass it.

Personally I don't see any great need for it.

I doubt you realise just how big a mars sized map would be. Aircraft would take hours to reach the other side. You will resign of boredom long before you reach your enemy.

As long as there no hard limits on the size its good. Hard limits suck even if you never reach them.

Unless you go 20 years into the future and have a match on a mars sized planet with 10,000 players. I doubt you will have trouble finding another players. Now how long that would take to complete is a completely different question, and not one I would want to try to find an answer to.

Europe taking an entire planet would look strange. with Spain being neighbourhoods with Norway but not Morocco.
Also, for some gameplays you want to have a playmap with borders. You can also use that for staging, by putting non-player-controlled units outside of those borders and/or in orbit, showing battles, or even giving the player a few out-of-map artillery units, for example. You can use it for closer battles, part of a bigger fight.
Other planets would also be here for staging. You could then have an entire mod taking place, for example, in a single system. Or even in a single planet. If you go for a campaign, you could use that to show the actual travels between the varied maps with cut-scenes in-engine.

The problem with that is that no computer would survive fully rendering an Earth-sized planet. The biggest SupCom maps were, what, 81km sided? Let's say around 7000 km². The Earth's surface is 510 million km², more than 50 000 times bigger.
On the other hand, if you can take the engine that only a small portion of it is interesting you, it can just crudely render the rest of the planet, with the general shape of the continents, for long-distance views, and actually use only the small portion for things like pathfinding, terrain calculations... That's how procedural planet generators like SpaceEngine do it, for example (though SpaceEngine don't have pathfinding issues, obviously).

It's more of the inverse, actually. The scale in PA looks great thanks to the art style, not the opposite. This scale forces you to use a light, stylish cartoony fun style. But more serious or more realistic styles would look plain silly.
And this is true for the tones you can give to a mod as well. It would be hard to take seriously the quest for finding a defence against the all-consuming Beast who was awoken, or the gripping story of a man caught by his dark past who has to take arms again, with such a cartoonish scale.
Look here for an example of how silly realistic look and cartoonish scales can be.
Edit : Disclaimer, I'm talking about the first video only, which was done this way intentionally AFAICT.

The ideal would be to have the engine being smart enough to scale the used map with how far your units go, a little bit like Minecraft loading new chunks as players move.
But it may be simpler to give the option to pre-set a hard limit. And sometimes, you want to put hard limits for gameplay reasons, even if you shape them as "if you send unit them, they will be destroyed" (or you just explains it so, but the units avoid those zones anyway, so it would work like map borders).

while I also don't really the see the practical need for, aside from some very specific mod plans, you could add 3 levels of impassable terrain.
e.g. the ground terrain you mentioned
some kind ("fill in sciency reason") atmospheric disturbance (preventing aerial units to cross)
some kind of astronomic disturbance to prohibit orbital/extra orbital interaction

with those 3 levels you could limit your map how you like it
PS: if you really want to be selective you could add something for water (e.g see monster )

Isn't this game's purpose exactly NOT to have borders, not being able to hide in corners? If you really want to do that, there are plenty of games out there.

This works both ways. They chose the art style to fit in the cartoony scale they chose for the visualisation. If you bring back these units in a much larger scale, it might not look as good.

I think that I know what you want, but I think it is outside the scope of this game. If you want more realistic scaled environments, there a lot of other games that will much better suit that kind of gameplay.

There are just a lot of things the dev need to change/work around for this to work within the rest of the game, which seems like a bit of a waste of time to me.

The game purpose, yes, but I'm talking about mods. Having small round planets only is a big limit for mods. As I said earlier, it's, among other things, a huge limit for what styles you can use.
Other games and engines have classical flat maps, yes, but I don't know any of them who has orbital layer and procedural generation (allowing for great landscapes around said map) included. So for many mods, it wouldn't be a solution.
The closer thing I can see would be a heavy modification of the Spring engine (which is outside of my skills), and even the end result would probably be far less optimised than the PA engine.

The scale here is the planetary scale, the few-km planets. You can have the same combat scale with flat maps. In fact, many games of varied genres did so, from Warcraft 3 to TF2, often with acclaimed success.
Km-sized planets constrain you to use cartoonish fun style, not the opposite.

I'm not so sure about that. Depending how the procedural generation is done, it could be not that hard to limit it to only a part of the planet. That's exactly what most procedural world generators like SpaceEngine do, after all.


So maybe it's already planned for this engine. Maybe it would be relatively easy to add at this point. Maybe it would be very hard or impossible. That's why I asked in the first place.

I for one would dearly love to have the option to have MASSIVE single planets, rather than rely on multiple-planet warfare to make the game interesting.

I am envisioning a legitimately Earth-scale world. It should be possible, with a powerful enough computer.

Another alternate way to do it would be to have enough moons for every player to have their own moon as a spawn location, and the ability to drop down to the surface of one Earth-scale planet. There are all kinds of ways to do this.