Gratuitously huge battles

#1

Having looked over some of the suggestions and some of the topics in the modding section I have come to a startling realisation.

Cliffski, if you can add being able to save and deploy formations like ships then there is serious potential for absolutely gargantuan battles. My reasoning for this is quite simple:

In the modding section you’ve said that there are no arbitrarily added limits to the number of ships that can be on screen, which means there are only two things stopping players from having fleets with hundreds of large ships. The first is map size, which (and correct me if I’m wrong here) can be increased almost indefinitely. The second is time, but if players could deploy whole formations of ships with one mouse drag, coupled with the new mass deploy, vast fleets could be leveled at one another quickly and easily, leading to some truly, truly gratuitously massive battles. The kind where ships at the back don’t reach the front until theres already a debris field three miles thick around them.

What I’m trying to get at here is that with the right tweaks and additions this game could go from being awesome to being epic. Severely epic.

#2

Let’s make sure things are working on the current scale first before we start ramping things up, however.

#3

Deploying formations would already be helpful on the current scale, though.

#4

The only limit on the number of ships on the screen are:

  1. How large the combined textures of all the ships are (more than 2gb and the game won’t ever load)
  2. How fast you want things to move.

Only #1 is actually a problem, the game still moves pretty fast at 4x when there are 33k fighters and ships on screen. Larger ships have larger everything (data, graphics), so I don’t think you could approach using large ships the limits I tested to with fighters. You could still figure it out pretty easily.

I think realistically having more than 500 ships doing stuff at once with the current playing field size (largest) is approaching the realm of total impracticality. And of course this is only true for people with middle to higher end computers.

#5

Since there is no interaction during battle then there could simply be an option to render the battle frame by frame into as a video…some sort of automatic camera movement would be necessary for that.