What is an ideal match to you?

Say, if everyone played perfectly?

Perfect play is a game-theoretic concept which entails actually "solving" the game; something hopefully quite far away for ZK since it's not much fun to play solved games.

So here's instead something i'd consider the most fun game: a serious 1v1 between two top10 players that lasts more than an hour, and features as many different factories and units as possible - preferably all of the factories, and at least one superweapon of at least nuke level.

quote: 128 players VS 128 AI's split into 8 teams, with each team being 50% AI, so 32 players total per team. A large map 100 x 100 with hills, sea, islands. A long 8 hour game, with some teams surviving super weapon attacks and going on to eventually win after weak points in other teams defences are exploited.

Translation: I want a game where half of the people lag out or quit in the first two hours, and to deal with constant AFK notifications, half of my metal going to defender/llt spam while committing to a stale match and letting my body suffer horrible health effects!

Serious points to consider:
- RTS is extremely harsh on the mind. There's a reason why large scale MMORTS games are typically web browser type games. The more decisions and active the player is and the longer the game run time is, the more mental fatigue will set in. This is typically why most hour plus games feel taxing to some people.
- Any person who drops out around the two hour mark is just not coming back period. Simming that long of a game is just going to take a very long time.
- Having half of your economy lost to AI is going to be a frustrating experience, not to mention you'd have to distribute AIs in a way that if any one player drops in a team, you would have back up hosts for the other ais. A single point of failure for the AIs in a team would just result in units sitting around if the AI host drops.
- The longer a game run time is, the more human limits you're going to run up against, which means more people will be going AFK at random and this can be frustrating.
- At 8 hours, you'd be mostly limited to 3-4 timezone differences total without running up against sleep.
- You'd need frequent breaks to allow 15 minute stretches/walks.
- The game would probably get pretty unplayable before the 4 hour mark with the number of players and AI spamming stuff out.
- Team FFAs are one of the most frustrating experiences in ZK, period.
- Zero-K's game design is more than likely not compatible with this.
- Coordinating 128 people to play this is going to be an organizational hell.

The more the merrier.
Less E-Sport more Casual.
( Shaman System limitations are the Develobs fault, tryhards deserve to be tired out. Ex.8-12 hours HOI4 MP games or Stellaris.)
A long game that isn't pointless.

Sadly the following 3 states show up too often:
- One side simply gives the other one a beating, match over in less than 30 min.

- Bouth Teams become "inactive" once a no-mans-land is established on the front.

- Games past the point of no return.

System limitations are not developers' fault when you attempt to do things outside of what we've designed them to work in and what we've guaranteed them to work in. You don't get to blame/sue the engineers for your car not working in space, it was never designed to work in space. Thinking you can scale up a traditional RTS that already struggles in 16v16 up to borderline MMO levels is absolutely absurd and not anyone's fault but the people trying to scale it up to MMO sizes should it not work.

What you're essentially trying to do is blame the developers for Mario Kart 8 not working when you modded it to throw 300 players on a single track. That game was never designed for an MMO experience and to blame the developers/designers for it not working in those conditions is completely unreasonable. Zero-K is the same way; sure we COULD potentially have up to 252 players in a match as that is Spring's limit but it does not mean that the game should be expected to function let alone be playable at that scale nor should we be expected to maintain it at that scale.

HOI/Stellaris are not on the same scale as ZK and the comparison isn't very applicable. HOI and Stellaris are grand level strategy games where you move army groups around and don't micromanage individual soldiers/ships in a battle against other soldiers/ships being micromanaged. There are significantly less decisions being made in these games in any given time span compared to ZK. Generally you're not deciding where each individual ship should go and you're generally controlling a handful of groups of units instead of hundreds of individual units or trying to line move all your units such that they can all fire. Those kinds of games are also designed around multiple play sessions whereas ZK MP is designed around single session completion.

quote: - see the 64 Player Lobpots again. (Hardware specs keep on growing)

You mean the ones that almost always ended with "failed to allocate memory"?

quote: Stellaris

I really hate that game. I tried twice in single player quite long games (many days) and each time I got more frustrated. I wanted to like it but really could not. One of the only games I bought on steam and did not recommend.

I think it is perfectly possible to improve the engine/zk to support as many player as you want. But as this is open source this needs to sound very good for the people wanting to put that effort. If it would be to guess I would say that people with the knowledge have strong enough computers not to have big issues and stable enough not to require catching up often.

For example, in my opinion website redesign would be more important than supporting larger games on older hardware.

Were getting waaay off topic now.

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