Is there a Max fleet size?

[Atlantika]

or is it depending on how much you can afford for upkeep/maintanence elc?
kinda hoping player + AI will have huge fleets and have these Epic Face-offs here and there.

if they can indeed have big fleets, will they attack the player & roam around the galaxy trying to mop up pirates / player / elc?

and lastly, how many different factions are there vying for control just curious if its just (player/friendly npc/pirate?) or is it those 3 with multiple friendlynpc who will declare war elc on eachother where the player could choose a side and tip the conflict one way or another or decide to go rogue and help pirates rape and pillage the galaxy?

[chaosavy]

Right now there is no max and no upkeep.

Early Access can be a bit of a chaotic time - in some ways it might be more fun, but at the same time its possible to be all powerful and reduce the challenge.

I'm going to come up with some initial fleet size, and with a method of increasing it, and also with some smallish upkeep.


Right now there are 2 pirate factions (which don't like each other), 1 military faction, 1 mining faction, 1 bounty hunter faction, 1 civilian faction, and 1 neutral faction (just added, so its pretty new and undefined). Each of these factions has their own base(s), ships, and missions (some needing more missions and all needing more ships).

There should be a alien faction added, and possibly a scrapper faction (though it may depend on how things go funding wise).


Declaring war implies factions sort of like "empires" - but the area of space is closer to a region within a particular empire. So the player is the only faction that will declare war.

[Atlantika]

ah I see, thank you.

[Aleccia Rosewater]

In the first game the unit cap was... pretty big, dozens and dozens of ships with a seperate unit cap for each class, all while running a smooth FPS on a decent computer. I think the main reason why there were unit caps at all in the first game is to keep the game moving rather then simply sitting there building hundreds of ships

Void Destroyer has one of the most efficient game engines I've ever seen; it has zero problem with large fleet battles or missile spam or even space-minefield spam. If there does end up being a unit cap it'll no doubt be a very generous one.

[chaosavy]

From the code here are the caps of part 1:

	fightersHardCap = 25;
	corvettesHardCap = 15;
	frigatesHardCap = 10;
	destroyersHardCap = 5;
	cruisersHardCap = 2;
	carrierHardCap = 1;

	capturesHardCap = 10;
	repairsHardCap = 4;
	transportsHardCapt = 5;
	minersHardCap = 6;
	tugsHardCap = 1;

Via captures you could buy pass these. Because ships tended to die fairly raplidy (RTS style) the battles could feel big - then 1/3 ships would die, then 1/3 ships would die... Wave of enemies over, player rebuilds - another big battle - etc :)

Unit caps are really important to game design - like Aleccia said, to prevent the sort of turtling/overwhelm the AI game play - plus for the mission/level designer to know what the player can have - which then co-responds what the player faces.

Plus at the end of the game - when the Outsiders non spoilers - big bad enemy faction - show up. Their ships were of the "advanced" type - so they didn't have engine trails/flares, and their weapons were primarily beam based (so hit scan - much less resources than the bunch of projectiles each ship could fire) - so that helped with performance - versus the big player fleet that was possible at the end of the game.


It worked out really well.

Now in part 2 - the ships are a lot more detalied (3x+ more polys), but the texture file used is tiny and re-used all over (so memory use in terms of textures should be far lower). The ships are larger in relation to eachother - and they should last longer - but video card tech should be 2+ years more advanced :)