enpi wrote:how many star systems is the largest possible map setup?

Map settings aren't in the game yet; currently the default randomized map has 43 star systems.

I'm not sure what the technical upper limit on the number of stars will be, but I imagine it will be quite large.

thanks. I hope it will be more than in MOO2 with its AFAIR only 120 systems. Is there a upper cap on no. of space ships?

enpi wrote:Is there a upper cap on no. of space ships?

again, the technical limit is probably pretty high; and we're not enforcing any upper limit per se. i haven't checked recently, but, in the alpha, i was able to start test battles involving more than 100 ships per side before giving the engine much trouble.

that said, most battles are fairly small -- fights involving more than 20 ships are pretty rare. and practically, when battles get bigger than that, players need tools for grouping their fleet into squadrons of some sort, or else controlling their ships becomes unreasonably tedious.

there actually are some primitive "ship group" features included in the current beta build -- but, none of our testers appear to have discovered them yet -- suggesting that that UI needs some serious work, at the very least

I think games with tactical battles are better with much lower ship counts.The economy should be balanced for that.Turn based combat with lots of ships was tedious in late game Moo2.

IMO, its a matter of taste. I could not detect anything "tedious" in MOO2 ship combat system. In contrary, it was great and large battles with dozens of ships were epic. I can often remember of large battles which lasts 2h and decided a whole war or even fate of my empire. I think the biggest failure of the newer 4x games is that they see micromanagement of ship battles as a problem and thus didnt develope proper subsystems (exception is Space Empires which had also a great tactical battle system)

Of course I also see that many people dont have the patience to control dozens or even hundreds of units in epic clashes by themselves. So a squadron system if well implemented could be the solution for these gamers. Other solutions could be an autocombat feature where they dont have to manage ships in detail but learn only the outcome of the combat. Or they could simply play a smaller map setting, where no empire has the fianancial capability to buy more than a few ships.

enpi wrote:IMO, its a matter of taste. I could not detect anything "tedious" in MOO2 ship combat system. In contrary, it was great and large battles with dozens of ships were epic.

It was fun on 1-2 occasions at most, for some decisive battles, like with the Antareans for example. Yet in all other cases in the late game and on 'Huge' maps, with lots of battle encounters every turn, with dozens of hi-end ships involved - it was really tedious. "Auto Combat" was the most appreciated option back then

Personal opinion.

Still I do remember the y or z hotkey for even faster auto combat fondly for late game.

My opinion after testing the map is actually small. Need more ranges and variations in systems for more realistic and for the reason that we need to get more time to level up. The current tries shown me some from the future map but actualy it's small and there is no chance to avoid the enemies. Other problems maybe it's a bug the AI difficulty is a bit high and spawn ultimately the ships .

The map size could be galactic civilisation or distant words like and could be some more cluster solar systems which can give some chance to improve your technology / colony without the fear the enemy is around the corner. I know still the diplomacy is broken so they are instantly attack you if they feel their fleets are more strenghtful than yours.

Other opinions will come soon.