Yeah, I was wondering that myself. Assuming that there is an 8-player maximum, I imagine that it will get larger as we go through the betas: GC2 had up to 10, counting the human.

Get on Impulse and look up Elemental, it tells you right there (1-8 players). Also, I thought it was mentioned in a Dev journal. Ill look through em and post it when I find it.

I've mentioned that old 'req' line many times and not noticed a dev reponse to it. My guess (hope?) remains that it is about the MP side of the game, not the real sandbox singleplayer mode. Dealing with even 8 other human players sounds like a hassle to me, but playing a Ludicrous-size map with only 8 factions on it does indeed sound rather barren.

Yes, I assumed he was talking about multiplayer only. It would be utter madness to have the sandbox games limited to 8 opponents. I'm under the impression that 8 players is a little light for multiplayer only but the restrictions there are far more stringent. Eight players for multiplayer perhaps is the most people that can play the game with the least amount of issues.

Certain of it for the final relsease. However, in the alpha and early beats, they still might want to limit the AIs to keep complexity down.

I'll be extremely sad if the number of AIs is limited to anything in the single-digits. I would love to play a massive 64-bit map with the same player density as you might find on a regular "huge" map. Empires here and there will dominate over regions, slowly swallowing up smaller ones, resulting in a final clash of the titans. Things like magic and master quest victories would mix this up a bit, of course, but still. Playing on a really giant map with only as many players as will comfortably fit on a regular large map would suck.

Don't get thrown off by the map size. There's nothing indicating the movement ranges are going to be as restrictive as the CIV games for example.

Given towns can span many squares, it's quite possible the range of movement for a unit could be quite large to keep everything in scale. An 8 player game on a large may map not feel barren at all if the scale of things is shifted. I always thought it was sort of "cramped" feeling in CIV where you'd have major population centers only 4 or 5 squares apart. 

I've no idea what the max number of players really will be, I'm just noting that don't let your preconceptions of maps size and unit movement lock you into an incorrect line of thinking about how cramped or open a map might be.

It seems obvious that the "1-8" is talking about human players (since it's 1 to 8, and it doesn't since to play with only 1 faction). I hope that 12 is not the max amount of factions though, in SP or MP. Especially on Large maps. I think it would kind of defeat the purpose of maving Huge maps for people on 64 bit systems if you could only have 12 factions...you would spend over half the game without meeting another faction probably lol. It seems like the max amount of factions should scale with map size like in Civ4 (but with alot more!!!!). Even playing with 16 people in Civ 4 I felt like that wasn't enough. It really depends on how minor races are treated in this game.

I'm sure MP games will have some AIs as well, otherwise the maps will be bare.  Makes sense to limit human players though, otherwise games will become unplayable with the lag and the wait between turns.  As Frogboy said, they will vary this in the beta to see what works.

With all of Brad's references to LOTR, I'd love to see unequal starting players. Maybe 30 players, but only a portion are true competitors on your level. Say, the Rohan who are large and active versus a more minor power like the Ents or Tom Bombadil, who are  powerful, but players to be courted or worked around rather than full fledged empires trying to take control.

It's somewhat annoying in most 4x games that everyone you meet is a full on equal enemy or mere minor nuisance like a barbarian. There's not really much in between.

Heh, I remember bringing up minor kingdoms before, but  I'd completely forgotten about that thread . 

That Independent Kingdoms thread is one of my favorites, especially after Johnny5446's post about Geoff the Slug. I'm definitely in support of that idea.

Really I think the key point is that 'minor civilizations' (or Independent Kingdoms or whatever they might be called) should be significant powers. They could grow in power over time fast enough to remain significant throughout the game, or they could start out much more powerful than actual players and gain power slower (or not at all). Barbarians in Civ IV are never significant powers, just nuisances, and minor civs in GC2 are exploitable pushovers. Neither pose challenges or interesting options.

And those are great examples. The Ents and Tom Bombadil are extremely powerful entities, but with no will for conquest - they just want to be left alone, really. Bombadil is pretty much godlike within his own small realm, to the point where not even the most powerful object left in Middle Earth affected him. And the Ents utterly annihilated a great portion of Saruman's forces with almost no effort or losses and tore down Isengard's walls with hardly any effort (I love that's described in the books - like how a tree's roots can crush stone over a long time, but much faster). Then after that, they completely annihilated a huge force of Sauron's orcs that was great enough to have challenged the riders of Rohan on their way to the defense of Minas Tirith. Not to mention Treebeard mentioned that the strength of trolls compared to ents is like the strength of a child compared to an adult.

So yeah - independent kingdoms like that would be awesome. And, even though they shouldn't really expand, if you piss them off they should still come for you - like when Saruman started harvesting Fangorn for lumber.