I have thought of using some game aspect to limit the number but it still return to the same question as what the ultimate cap is. I thought about flag ships in each task force has some command points, but that doesn't solve the problem because how many flag ships are you allowed? Making flag ship as a empire wonder or system wonder may be an option. Flag ships can have powerful abilities like massive AoE black hole generators that adds extra dimension to the game; it also gives the player something to do instead of just issuing general commands to small TF he controls. In this respect, the flag ship is a "character" in your fleet and becomes another tatical option. For some of the newcomers, we planned to have special predefine ships build as empire wonders; they will have cool names with special abilites. But the question of how many allowed in the same battlefield is still unanswered; can you have 1 Devestator flag ship and 10 zillion fighters?Geoff the Medio wrote:Rather than just saying "no", I was suggesting that the limits be integrated into the design of the game, from tactical and strategic perspectives. Rather than having a single hard limit, various factors that the player could control to some degree would determine how many ships can be in a battle. For example, a certain class of ship that is required to allow your ships to be together as a fleet could be required. Having such ships might make for various interesting situations, like the possibility of dealing with the loss of one of those ships and the resulting reduction in allowed fleet size, making them very important to protect / attack, and the increased importance of working with allies, since each allied race working together in a battle might get their own independent fleet point limit.PowerCrazy wrote:Any kind of arbitrary caps should be avoided.
Yes there will be a practical cap but that should have to do with hardware/software restrictions solely, not to balance the game. Game balance can be achieved in other ways besides just telling the player "no."
The whole thing would probably need to be based around diminishing returns... so that no matter how many fleet-allowing ships you add, there's eventually a hard limit to fleet sizes, in order to prevent hardware limits from being reached. But this wouldn't be perceived as an arbitrary / hard limit, as it would seem to arise out of the limiting system to the player.
Another thought was using the number of star bases and shipyard a players control. That number determines how many TF you can effectively can communicate and control. In addition, this method also help with the natural defense problem in the game when ppl send one scout conquering all your backwater planets in moo1. The problem with this method is that how many star bases and shipyards are you allowed to have? one per planet or system maybe? Or can the ship cap be imbedded into the soft cap maintainece system of star bases or shipyards.
No limit seems good to me. We can use Impaler's way to deal with hardware limits.