What to AVOID AT ALL COSTS in the making of this game.

Exactly, the producers want the player choice to be "play the game", if it wasn't how would they get their money? You need to think this through first.

arbitrary population limits beyond something the host decides in game settings to minimize lag (see: supcom) are awful.

One, how do you think an arbitrary unit cap will solve anything? Will it magically detect the optimum settings for everyone in your game? Of course not.

Two, yes, Uber wants people to play the game. So go play on smaller maps, and your problem is solved (so long as you don't play a three hour no rush game or something ).

in the end there are to unit caps (not necessarily fixed settings, just realities)
a) server side, limited by what the server hardware can handle, probably should be adjusted so that the server doesn't crash at the peak of a game.
b) client side, the maximum amount of stuff your own hardware can display without too much lagging. It's a rather soft limit and very user specific (hardware, number of viewports, usual viewing angle).

a) and b) aren't the same, both can cause lag depending which is nearing its limit, but only b) can be influenced by the player (as long as he doesn't host himself)
at least due to the client server model, having people dealing with client side lags doesn't kill the game bases on synch issues.

also things like units per player etc might have influence , e.g., 4000 units from 4players with each 1000 probably behave different than 40players with each 100 in terms of what the actual bottleneck is.


So defining a unit cap even one that everyone can choose themselves isn't easy.

if you followed their update videos and are playing the alpha you'd know that's not the case and that's certainly not the way they're headed so rest assured no silly formation-moving, and let me venture a bet here but you're a starcraft II player who saw how SupCom 2 units moved and it made you sick (it did the same thing to me, up top). However unlike Starcraft, when people say "Oh my Goooood SupCom is aaaawsoooome blablabla..." they aren't vouching for any of it's installements regardless, they generally are reffering to SupCom FA specifically (because SupCom 2 was a callamity (hey it happens) ). Well Sup Com FA didn't have that type of unit movement and neither did TA, and TA spring (other titles that might have also sliped your scope of expertise).

And if by spread out you mean these sickeningy perfect formations that they addopt in SupCom2 I don't know how you see that as realism.

Also if you tried in SupCom FA a "right click and drag" to move troops, you did in this case engage "move in a formation" which was unfinished work in this game and does not function, the default is simply right click and yes, in this case they do engage troops automatically. And no a "move to this destination while getting shot at but not having the right to do anything about it and suck it up, yes that dude just shot you in the balls, no you may not shoot him back, wasn't I clear the first time" command does not exist in that game and I do agree that this is a sad thing, but you can (if necessary) go over to the type of fire and switch out of the three choices "return fire" to "hold fire", that accomplishes the same effect.

Yea this is probably what I will do, however it still leaves the problem of the game not being quite as much fun because of the small scale. I think it should be an option to vote for unit cap on the larger maps so you can still have large scale without so much lag.

Yea may of the updates are making this game a lot better and it will still be updating for months when it is already almost perfect so I'm pretty excited, so excited that I'm going to buy a gaming computer sooner. But anyway I have been watching some of the videos and it looks pretty good (I do wish it were slightly more like starcraft 2 with the micro AND macro instead of just macro but it looks fun anyway)

I'm sure there will be plenty of mods for micro focused play.