Restriction On Human Players To 4?

I would like a minimum of eight, as that would allow us to use every base race in the game and have more interesting scenarios.

There's no reason aside from a technical one to not include more.

^ Second that. There is no reason to have this arbitrary limit of 4. Coding wise, it is of little difference.

And there is the posibility that someone will set up a computer to act as the universe for many players.

If we had PBEM in multi then we could easily have 100 humans on a map. Playing once a day.

It would take lots of time but the social interaction of the players by playing and emails will ...

Why is the limit for human players so low?

game pacing?

Not speaking out of any knowledge, but I'm guessing the limit is there because waiting for more than 3 other players to take their turns makes the game too slow. Even with three, you could easily be talking 30min or more between turns. Maybe a warning rather than a hard cap would be a better approach though, so those that are willing to deal with that kind of pacing can.

The game can't support simultaneous turns because.. why? That is the one plus of a lack of tactical battles.

I think 4 might be too low for me too. If there are going to be simultaneous turns then 8 seems much better!

If waiting between turns is the only problem, then there should a warning about that but also a way to play with more players if it isn't problematic to implement that. Games with 10+ players (or as many as memory limit allows if that is the only issue) would be awesome if that could be done akin to civilizations 4's pitboss or something like that.

If there is some other problem with many human players in one game, I would really like to know what it is.

Because then it wouldn't be a TURN-based game.

Not being snide, but once you get out of the lockstep idea of having only one side be allowed to perform an action, you start to introduce all sorts of problems of synchronization and "who gets to do what first" issues. That doesn't even bring up the issues of automatic moves.

Frankly, once you've gotten out of the locked turn concept, you might as well move directly to Real Time, because the problem is actually easier if you go away from player-defined turns, and step directly into automatic milisecond turns (which is how RTS games actually work).

Overall, I think the best compromise here to accommodate large numbers of human players would be to strictly enforce turn time limits. I'd say 5 minutes, max.  That encourages good automation and management by players, and kicks the feet out from under the micro-managers.

At best, for "simultaneous" play (that is, allowing other players to take actions out-of-turn), I'd vote for allowing only NON-SHIP actions; e.g. managing your planets. I'd probably not even want to allow initiation of trades (i.e. only the "active" turn player can initiate deals).

Everyone I have ever played in MP is pretty fast. Micromanagers don't like MP from my experience.

doesn't that 64x bit stuff help with player caps? Let us press the limits while in the alpha. Please.

DARCA.

I think it was pointed out above that there should be no technical reason to not allow a large number of humans.  Certainly, it should be constrained only by the performance of the least-capable system attached, primarily in terms of memory available.

It looks to be only of a User Experience challenge.

And, speaking as someone who has access to some pretty ridiculously high powered systems, it would be really nice if we could run everything in a "1 host/multi-guest" setup, where the guests handled the UI and graphics load, but the backend computation of actual moves was handled (Mostly) by a dedicated box.

I mean, right now, there's a 12 core/24 thread box with 48GB of ram sitting next to my feet, idle.  Sure would be nice to run it as a server and let lots of less-advantaged people hook up to it for some sort of epic multiverse shebang.

Endless Space and AoW3 do simultaneous turns just wonderful. So i guess i am in disagreement and vote for simultaneous turns.

Simultaneous turns generally plays far smoother and faster for multiplayer.  The principle downside is gaminess involving clicking faster for moving a stack of units and gaining an advantage that way.  There's ways around this, though - like only executing unit moves at the end of turns, or stopping the game to allow reaction moves in response to a threatening move by another player.

Why not do what Civ does and make it so turns can be simultaneous, but have a toggle to flip it to the other types when desired. I believe the default for Civ V is "hybrid" mode, where it is simultaneous until a human declares war on a human, then their moves become based on turn order.

I guess an option to turn it off or on for multiplayer might be fine. But if it came down to either individual turns or simultaneous turns then I would prefer individual turns.