It is time to consider the option of playing more than just 8 per game. During the life of the game we have seen how we the maps and pop caps have increased in different expansion but we still have the same lobby size as in 1999.
At the moment, with all the performance issues and late game lag, it doesn’t make sense to add it. Nevertheless, as soon as we are back to normal it will an awesome feature.
It could also be balanced for performance considerations, so that if we are, let’s say, 12 in a lobby, the maximum pop cap could be 250 so that it never exceeds a certain total population.
How awesome would it be to see free for all community games with 10/12 or even 16 players, or playing 5v5 tournaments and team games. We already have the map sizes for it and the engine should sustain it.
On the competitive level it would also be a welcomed addition as many teams have more than just 4 players and there are multiple team tournaments.
Let me know what you think and let’s get this to the devs!!
It would be great for Diplomacy games as well. But I think ranked should might need to stay at 4v4 for team games. Unless, there’s a separate team ranking for more than 8 players.
Maybe a way to partially introduce this feature in the game right now would be to let more than 8 players enter the lobby so that they can use the coop feature to control a maximum of 8 civilizations. Example: 16 people could enter a lobby and each team of 2 control a civilization each.
Before you add 10 player games with 250 pop they have to fix this part that games starts lagging and becomes too slow in late game or it can be fixed that players need to get better pc and better internet speed.
In pro tournaments, if the rules compel the players to use only one civilization that hasn’t been drafted before, and there are a ban and a snipe stage, we can barely have enough nations to play with. Lets say that we want a 5v5 Bo5 series, then 10 players must pick a civ each round, which means that there should be 50 civs! So, we can only have at most a Bo3 with 30 nations available in this case. Probably that’s why 4v4 tournaments are not a big deal, since you can deplete the 35 available options in a Bo5 situation.
I agree.
They could at least add more slots in the lobby.
For example we are at LAN Parties sometimes 9 or 10 players. It would be great if 2 people could play as the same colour when we are 9 people. This would not drain the games resources as in this case they are only 8 parties in-game…
Also a spectator slot that can pick a team would be great. Right now there is only the option to spectate the whole game (including the enemy).
The engine is too old and doesn’t support any of those features, the simulation runs in one single core/thread, adding more calculations would increase massively the lag, games with 300 pop or more are only doable in single player, online beyond 200 in 4x4 is a lagfest at any game version cause the engine is the same.
For more player you would have to wait for aoe4, this game can’t handle more.