The Scale of the Mod

This is a fairly simple question, but one that will have serious ramifications on the direction this mod takes. The question is: What scale is it going to be? There's the Star Trek-style small scale, in which big ships are a few hundred meters long and most battles involve only two or three ships. Even the largest battles, like Wolf 359, only involve about 40 ships. Then there's the Sins of a Solar Empire-style medium scale, in which ships are, as far as we can tell, a few hundred meters to a kilometer long, and battles might involve a hundred ships. And finally there's the Star Wars-style large scale, in which thousands of multi-kilometer ships engage in epic battles that cover entire planets. Which one will we use? The larger the scale the more awesome (I mean no disrespect to Star Trek there, but think about the Battle of Coruscant with more than 3,000 capital ships compared to Wolf 359 with 40), but also harder on computers. Small scale would be easier to do, but is less likely to fulfill the grand vision that I assume Mackeroth and Fr0stbyte have.

I think the 'grand vision' is far too ambitious and will doom this mod to failure before it's even properly conceived.

Star Trek-type battles would be best, no unreasonable amounts of ships. Anything more and, well, it just won't work, is what I'm saying here. While it's nice to look forward to combat as being right out of a sci fi movie with hundreds of 4 km long ships duking it out, the sad reality is that even if the dev team were a crack team of coders all participating in this revamp phase, it just wouldn't be possible, I don't think. Even fr0st said that there's no guarantee we'll even be able to build ships over a km long. There's nothing to suggest that this wouldn't apply to fleet engagements, either, as far as supporting lower-end systems and appeasing the buggy minecraft engine.

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

USMC1000 wrote:

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

This isn't so much a question about entertainment value as it is support.

Everyone knows bigger fleets would be funner to fly in or even command, but there's no guarantee that servers or clients could handle such quantities of craft onscreen at once.

I like star trek scale maybe just a bit larger say like 4-5 per battle(not including fighters.)

You forgot about Warhammer 40k scale, which is 15 or so 10 kilometer long ships that fight at ranges of hundreds of kilometers.

I would probably say about Star Trek scale to SoaSE scale for really huge battles.

Tiel wrote:

USMC1000 wrote:

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

This isn't so much a question about entertainment value as it is support.

Everyone knows bigger fleets would be funner to fly in or even command, but there's no guarantee that servers or clients could handle such quantities of craft onscreen at once.

Tiel: Read the post again. He agrees with you.

Anyways: Lets assume 5 people can crew a vessel: Say SUPER POPULAR SERVER_1 has 50 people on ALL THE TIME CAUSE THAT MAKES SENSE!

They could have 10 cruisers. Say Server _2 also has 10 cruisers. Wow, big fight here. But still only 20 cruisers. And that's with 100 people hosted on a server at once. THAT IS ONE BIG SERVER!

Star Trek battle size.

Keon wrote:

Tiel wrote:

USMC1000 wrote:

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

This isn't so much a question about entertainment value as it is support.

Everyone knows bigger fleets would be funner to fly in or even command, but there's no guarantee that servers or clients could handle such quantities of craft onscreen at once.

Tiel: Read the post again. He agrees with you.

Anyways: Lets assume 5 people can crew a vessel: Say SUPER POPULAR SERVER_1 has 50 people on ALL THE TIME CAUSE THAT MAKES SENSE!

They could have 10 cruisers. Say Server _2 also has 10 cruisers. Wow, big fight here. But still only 20 cruisers. And that's with 100 people hosted on a server at once. THAT IS ONE BIG SERVER!

Star Trek battle size.

Not to mention it would lag like crazy, or at least with my computer it would.

USMC1000 wrote:

Keon wrote:

Tiel wrote:

USMC1000 wrote:

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

This isn't so much a question about entertainment value as it is support.

Everyone knows bigger fleets would be funner to fly in or even command, but there's no guarantee that servers or clients could handle such quantities of craft onscreen at once.

Tiel: Read the post again. He agrees with you.

Anyways: Lets assume 5 people can crew a vessel: Say SUPER POPULAR SERVER_1 has 50 people on ALL THE TIME CAUSE THAT MAKES SENSE!

They could have 10 cruisers. Say Server _2 also has 10 cruisers. Wow, big fight here. But still only 20 cruisers. And that's with 100 people hosted on a server at once. THAT IS ONE BIG SERVER!

Star Trek battle size.

Not to mention it would lag like crazy, or at least with my computer it would.

Besides the part about lag, which I understand and agree with, this problem is what I hope NPC ships will help deal with. In SoaSE, one player controls hundreds or (If he's spamming scouts) thousands of ships.

Keon wrote:

Tiel wrote:

USMC1000 wrote:

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

This isn't so much a question about entertainment value as it is support.

Everyone knows bigger fleets would be funner to fly in or even command, but there's no guarantee that servers or clients could handle such quantities of craft onscreen at once.

Tiel: Read the post again. He agrees with you.

I confess to skimming. My apologies, USMC.

Tiel wrote:

Keon wrote:

Tiel wrote:

USMC1000 wrote:

I personally think that the "Star Wars Scale" is way to big to be fun plus I think it would be impracticable as fleets would need to have truly loyal players and great communications to operate a battle of that magnitude.

This isn't so much a question about entertainment value as it is support.

Everyone knows bigger fleets would be funner to fly in or even command, but there's no guarantee that servers or clients could handle such quantities of craft onscreen at once.

Tiel: Read the post again. He agrees with you.

I confess to skimming. My apologies, USMC.

None are due, you are entitled to your opinion, even if it was misconstrued.

I vote for the smaller 5 or 6 ships in a battle, but numbers will vary all the time of course, we will most definitely see a lot of 1 ship vs. 1 ship battles though, to be realistic.

Hmm. Everyone seems to like small battles but me. Is this just about lag, or what?

Battle of Coruscant:

05-032 Medicant Bias wrote:

Hmm. Everyone seems to like small battles but me. Is this just about lag, or what?

Battle of Coruscant:

Battles like that would be ideal, 10 ships and a handful of fighters.

At least, that's all I see in that picture. I'm sure the wiki says otherwise, though one has to wonder just how Palpatine pulled thousands of ships out of his arse.

05-032 Medicant Bias wrote:

Hmm. Everyone seems to like small battles but me. Is this just about lag, or what?

Battle of Coruscant:

Not just about lag but also about logistics and the ability to preform on such a massive scale. Its just impractical. In other words such a huge operation could not be preformed by a few fleet admirals and captains. Plus it wouldn't be fun to even try, just more like a headache, but that's just me.

There will be a lot of 1v1 and 1v2 ship battles. Small, less powerful weapons would be a fix to the small number of ships, as the battles would be more lengthy.

I would say the really big battles would be super cool, but very taxing
performance-wise.

From a technical standpoint, bandwidth is going to be the bottleneck rather than world simulation (assuming regular simulation on board ships is comparable to vanilla). We have a pretty sizeable advantage that that moving around won't trigger tons of chunk loading.

Just guessing at this point, but the deciding factor to the scale of fleets is going to lie in the number of players on the server and the number of entities being used. I would be careful with missile spam.

The draw distance of ships will be determined by your computer, but won't heavily affect the server. We'll just have to see.

Just saying; any space battle with any ships will seem epic. Really, there's no need to go beyond the "small" scale. People just won't be able to build ships that large, and computers won't be able to handle it. If you have a look at any of the ships we built that are the scale of a Star Trek ship (100-500 blocks long), you will see that they are pretty massive, and that having a battle with even a few of them will prove epic.

Tiel wrote:

05-032 Medicant Bias wrote:

Hmm. Everyone seems to like small battles but me. Is this just about lag, or what?

Battle of Coruscant:

Battles like that would be ideal, 10 ships and a handful of fighters.

At least, that's all I see in that picture.

To say it like this:
If you looked at a small area of the sky, you would see hundreds of ships.
And it would be like that all around the planet.

Also too much Rule of Cool. It's like Pokemon: you caught god. What u gonna do now?

Starwars also has that:

13 meter tall thing beats sun, cant be destroyed?

Eh.

Let's use 40562349625 bajillion ships to take one planet instead.

How about no.

I don't think the problem is with strategy. You would just have to plan it like a real war. Spend a long time planning and making sure everyone knows their positions and orders. Then you hit them. If you spontaneously decide to attack a server it will be pure chaos (which war is anyway). Form your ships into a nice square with a few extra ships on the side for flanking. This will assure you can hit the ships from every angle maximizing damages.

Tiel wrote:

05-032 Medicant Bias wrote:

Hmm. Everyone seems to like small battles but me. Is this just about lag, or what?

Battle of Coruscant:

Battles like that would be ideal, 10 ships and a handful of fighters.

At least, that's all I see in that picture. I'm sure the wiki says otherwise, though one has to wonder just how Palpatine pulled thousands of ships out of his arse.

In this one image of this one part of the battle, I see 19 capital ships:

4 Venator-class Star Destroyers (1,137 meters long, 420 starfighters, 40 transports, 24 ground vehicles, 2,000 infantry, crew of 7,400)

1 Providence-class carrier/destroyer (1,088 meters long, 240 starfighters, 440 ground vehicles, 125,000 infantry, crew of 350)

2 Recusant-class light destroyers (1,187 meters long, 240 starfighters, 40,000 infantry, crew of 300)

3 Luchrehulk-class battleships (3,170 meters long, 1,500 starfighters, 50 transports, 8,300 ground vehicles, 329,600 infantry, crew of 350)

9 Munificent-class star frigates (825 meters long, 0 starfighters (Can be modified, I'm assuming these are standard), 150,000 infantry, crew of 200)

Making a grand total of:
19 capital ships
6,900 starfighters
~310 transports/shuttles
25,436 ground vehicles
2,551,800 infantry
33,400 crewmembers

And that's just what happened to be onscreen at that moment. I have no idea how many you can see in larger shots, if there are any. Wookieepedia says that the complete numbers for the battle are >1000 Venators, >1000 Recusants, >1000 Munificents, and several dozen Luchrehulks. If battles are like this, I would call it large-scale.

My response was so awesome it killed the whole thread.

No, it's because star wars is ROC.

So nobody cares about it. I mean, the real ones were good, but expanded universe? Yeah right.