Andreas, I think you are overdoing it
AndreasR wrote:I think Freeciv-web could easily have enough user-demand to fill a game with 1000 players and 10k tiles
I'm not sure why you think so. I just re-checked the first test game, the one with 150 players. True, it seems today (Turn 6) the last AI was taken over by live plaers. However, out of those 150 people, 44 never logged in after they signed up and only 64 have been active on the last turn. I'd say that having a game with 250 players may be good for testing purposes, to see how many will persist, but not much more. I said it in another post, but it seems it has been ignored.
Also, I said some other things so I'll quote myself here.
First, the map is (still) too small. That's 120 tiles per player, including water. One city occupies 21 tiles. Is 6 cities per player (or less) an interesting game? (Unless you really want to stimulate all-out carnage?) Keep in mind that this is LongTurn, players have a whole day to make their move, if an empire remains small, it doesn't really get more interesting, you do your moves in half a minute and you're done for the day. No or very little sense of growth.
It is also irrelevant whether there are 50 or 500 players with this kind of map. You are limited to, say, six immediate neighbours and the world further away has no significance. With so little water the map is monotonous and may as well be all land. You are confined to your small area and have no way of discovering what is happening outside of your event horizon; you could send explorers over other people's territory, if they let you, but little else.
Yes, I understand you increased water from 15% to 21%, but that is still way too small to utilise sea travel; with this ratio, the "oceans" are still just a bunch of lakes. No real exploration. You can't send a ship on a voyage of discovery and make contact with someone who is not your immediate neighbour.
Keep in mind that a human being can't really grasp too large groups of people Like I said, six, maximum ten immediate neighbours, and after that the stuff gets overwhelming. The last GreatTurn game had 50 players and nobody CARED what is happening outside of his 10 closest and next-to-closest neighbours. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that games should have 10-20 players. It's good to have a feeling that *something* is happening beyond your event horizon. But I think that anything beyond 100 players is an unnecessary overkill.
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All that said, I have one variant about how this may come out good. If there are 250 nations, judging by the current numbers, only 40% or less of them remain active and swallow the rest without resistance. That would mean an increase from 120 tiles per player to at least 300 before any serious conflict, which is a bit more acceptable. But this is why it would be good to hear from you where you are going with all this. Do you really want to run games with hundreds of players or is this just some testing to check server limits.
But still, there must me much more seas. I repeated many times, 50% would be a minimum, 35% preferable. Simply, if Civ is a historic simulation, unless there is an experimental setting with specific stuff, the map should mimic historic circumstances. Also, more water and continental map setup gives more diversity to the game; fractals and low water make everything look the same.
About memory load, I may have an idea for a solution. Since this is LongTurn and not a fast-paced game, not everything needs to be loaded into memory at the same time. Only those people who are currently online need direct access. Everything else can be saved on disk and called when particular players get online (and saved to disk and wiped form memory when they get offilne). Yes, this may mean a slightly bigger load at Turn Change, but still far from 100%.