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after good portion of units or big map size
game Lags
TL, DR: Infinite units will eventually break both the engine and your computer. You would get instances where it would take several seconds for your units to move after being given an order because your PC needs to calculate all the pathfinding for each individual unit. You'd introduce more opportunities for comically unpleasant, game-crashing bugs that simply can't be fixed without changing the engine or inventing something completely new that can't run on most PCs.
Basically, unit caps are required for the game to function properly. This isn't some "lol let's do it for giggles" sort of thing, this is a "we need to limit them at some point or else the quality of the game will be destroyed" and you'll get review bombed by players upset that building too many units caused their game to crash and for them to lose an hour or two of progress.
It's easy to say "just remove the caps," but until you know why they exist in the first place you're basically just saying "just make every soldier have animation as high quality as a Pixar film." Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's reasonable - or even possible - to do. At least, not without destroying your product's viability.
Unit caps have always existed, too. The original unit cap of C&C, for example, was apparently 300. RA supposedly had a cap of 500. Notably problems occurred long before you reached that point - such as being able to select 200 units but if you clicked to tell them to go somewhere only 100 would actually move.
The only difference between then and now is that you know a limit exists.
Besides what above user has said
, which perfectly applies from a technical point of view, you wouldn't be able to micro 1000 units, they would be all over the place, they would also get stuck constantly, so the only thing would be just to select them and send them forward and see who wins the spam. If that is your thing, fair play to that, but you'd need an RTS built specifically for that, which is not C&C, not Tempest Rising. Sure, you'd be able to have some fun with it however clunky it may be, but you'd be better off with the likes of Supreme Commander or Ashes of the Singularity, which are a different type of RTS and are built for huge armies to work and also make sense.
Back to our game here, imagine you have a regular map like in the Tempest Dynasty demo mission, where you have lots of corridors, higher ground, chokepoints etc, these are expected to feature in most maps because you have to give the map some sort of strategic and tactical value to be exploited. Now you have all these units at your disposal which do different things for different situations. One shoots from distance, one gets better up close, one has to go on the higher ground, one has to send drone to scout and potentially eliminate a specific target etc. Also very important aspect: there is also the unit collision! All of these come together in some form of fine micro. I don't want to say the game is or needs to be hard micro based, but in order to not be generic and not automatised, you need different uses which involve some micro.
Now imagine you had hundreds of units, or even thousands, lets imagine there was an option for it and you and the other players agreed for a non-rush treaty in order to build big armies. And let's say everyone had a very powerful computer and the game wouldn't malfunction completely. Now imagine the moment you'd finally attack. You immediately notice it's not functioning because not only there's no place for maneuver, you'd be so overwhelmed with the many unit purposes that the only human thing to do would be just to select as many units as you can, send them into the fray, and see who wins the unit spam in the end.
Now again, if you like this type of gameplay, well done to you, but the game would need to be specifically designed with some serious automatisation in mind where most of the stuff would require a far less direct player input - lessening the need for micro and emphasising the need for macro; immediately here you have a different type of RTS. You would also need different style of maps, no friendly unit collision, different engine from the get go which doesnt deal with individual units separately.
These are Supreme Commander and Ashes of the Singularity. They are nice games, if you havent tried them i highly recommend them. But you'd see how they are entirely different type of RTS games.
Has this made any sense? Let me know your take on this.
Say you give an RTS soldier the order to attack-move.
The software now needs to:
- Figure out the shortest path from A to B
- Figure out where other units are in relation to it
- Figure out how to not have their paths constantly intersect with the other paths so that they are frequently stopping and starting as they are interrupted
- Run the appropriate animation and sound effect
- Keep track of the range of the unit in question, as well as its hitbox
- Keep track of enemy units - both at range and if a vehicle unit intersects with its hitbox and therefore squishes it
- Transition from one animation to the other as fluidly as possible
- Also be easily selectable and able to achieve all of these things within fractions of a second.
Get five units? Not too bad.
Get 200 units (minimum for MP)? Okay, it's a little rough particularly with the third problem, but it can work.
Get 800 - a 4v4 - and the software is putting on a brave face while barely keeping it together
Give everyone infinite units and let you go to, say, 400-500 units per player? Suddenly the 4v4 has 4000 units to keep track of and the engine is begging for the sweet release of death.
Even Supreme Commander, a game literally defined by the sheer scale of its conflict, actually had a hard cap of I think 1000-2000 units "per side" - so in singleplayer your limit was 1000, but in a 4v4 your limit would be 250 per player - and even then in singleplayer I frequently encountered circumstances where I'd order my units do go somewhere and it would take over a second for them to react to the order while not being anywhere near that limit.
Gamers just don't seem to grasp the amount of work that goes into the products they play.
Though, I guess the bonus is that humans also have a comically bad grasp of what those numbers actually look like and frequently believe a few hundred people are in fact tens of thousands. So I suspect these people don't necessarily want 1000 units - they just want it to feel like 1000 units.
Reminds me of how some programmers originally introduced randomness into games and how the reaction to it wasn't "oh wow that's random" but rather "that's absolutely not random," compelling those programmers to essentially design a system that felt random but was, in fact, weighted to give results that the players would (erroneously) expect to see from a RNG.
Maybe this is it for me. It's not that I need infinite cap, when I play RTS, I just want the cap to be high enough that - It is normally impossible to reach or need really long time to reach. Whether it is a high cap adjustable by player (like AOE2 or Homeworld 1-2) or a high hidden cap (RA2). I don't like the feeling when I can only built only few unit and the cap is already reached and get constantly reminded about it by the game. Especially if every units in that game doesn't share the same unit cost.
So far, I think Tempest Rising unit cap seem to be high enough but let's wait for a full game to see how the situation really look like.
What makes C&C unique is the infinite pop cap and the macro aspects of this game (especially Generals and Red Alert 2 and 3), I have played the C&C (for the most part) on and off for all my life, and I have spawned 200+ Overlord tanks during Skirmish games, General Challenges, even 300+ Avatars/Carriers in KW's Global Conquest. (Yeah, I didn't know there was a pop limit in Red Alert 2, but I'm sure there are videos of I dunno... 1000 Kirov airships in Youtube? Same thing to Red Alert 3 with the 1000+ Kirovs - Meaning Red Alert 2 HAD no pop limit, and it sure as hell there were no pop limits to other C&C games.)
But to put a limit into it does turn off some of the players, especially those who love Steamrolling and casual players who just wanna have fun while using a little bit of abilities here and there.
I understand that putting a limit does significantly help the engine, and props the devs for doing that. But I hope they would at least turn that 200 limit into 300 just to give us that creative freedom to turn our brains off sometimes. In Kane's Wrath, even if you make a big ass army and the enemy destroys it, it's not GG, but in games like Starcraft, DOW, AoE, your main fighting force dies, you basically ruined your shot and you have no chance in fighting back (correct me if I'm wrong)
Either way, It's still disappointing to see a limit, and probably - I'll play this only for the campaign and that's it. Skirmish games won't be as fun in this game, unless they add custom mods that have infinite pop cap (also the only reason why I love Starcraft 2, I can spawn 200+ Thors/Siege Tanks)
I could play Battle Simulators and all that, but in my opinion, C&C strikes the perfect balance between Macro and Micro, lots of Macro aspects, but also a little Micro to change the tide even in smaller fights. It has it's charm that no other RTS have. And seeing Tempest Rising being inspired by C&C, made me hopeful, only to have that limit decreased from 300 to 200, and making ALMOST every unit have an ability (which is the same thing as Red Alert 3, but I play less of that) makes me doubt my time in this game and just head back to playing C&C games and a little bit of Custom Starcraft skirmishes all over again.
I dunno, I said my piece :\
I do agree, at least, that not all units need to have an ability - toggle or otherwise. Sometimes you just need a tank to be a tank and finagling little abilities is tedious rather than fun.
In practice, this almost never happened. By the time the game reached the limit, the match is a boring camp & harvest peacefully all day type of match anyway.
Sure, you can build a lot of units, but the nuke kind of altered the gameplay behaviour, even the most turtle and eco boom player would throw everything he has to prevent a devastating nuke launch.
You could easily deal with trooper blobs as tank and harvesters did crush soldiers.
Unit limit was and is never ever a problem.
After all we have today much stronger PCs, how can it be an issue in year 2023, if my old Computer from 1997 was able to handle 10.000 soldiers in Cossacks?
Lost 40K Warhammer dark age technology?
Simple: engines designed for those purposes and much simpler interactions/less moving parts with units back them. Simply taking 2d into 3d is a big leap - which is why you see old 2d games being the ones that can have that many units, whereas more modern games in 3d tend to struggle with it.
It's not just about the PCs, though: it's about the engine and how some engines cheat to give you those huge numbers you're looking for.
For example, Total War: known for having hundreds to thousands of units on screen and still being able to run. Y'know how they do that? Every group is essentially one "unit," so you're not looking at hundreds of thousands of units; you're looking at ten or twenty. They're largely self-contained squads that mitigate as much of the load of having that many units as they can.
Planetary Annihilation has thousands of units functioning independently, but also aggressively simplifies the calculations they need to make in order for them to function. Tends to make the units feel "floaty."
That said, if you're not using those engines and you want something more complicated re: unit interaction things tend to scale up badly very quickly. Like, there's a game in which the graphics are basically Dwarf Fortress and it's made on unity. Runs mostly fine outside of bugs. But if you, say, drop a coin down a deep well and the game suddenly has to start generating multiple floors that the coin is dropping past on its way down, suddenly the engine is dying because it wasn't designed to handle those sorts of calculations that quickly.
The engine they're using (either self-created or a cheaper one used for other games) probably wasn't designed to run hundreds of thousands of units on it. I doubt they licensed out engines from these other companies that built their engines from the ground up to have these sorts of numbers. So they gotta work with what they have, practically speaking.
And, uh, no, it's not as easy as just licensing those other engines - they're often either not for licensing or lack some fundamental functionality that a game like Tempest Rising requires to feel like C&C at all.
Game development is, at the end of the day, mitigating your vision of what you want to create with what you can physically create. It's never going to be perfect but, hopefully, it's good enough.
Another game, which was directly designated for "tons of units", is Ashes of the Singularity