Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Difference between revisions

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{{quote|''"No no no, you don't understand. You see, I only had one ring left to protect my teammates from being in the Edge, so I had to leave the rest behind. I mean, [[Who Would Be Stupid Enough...?|what kind of idiot]] goes into battle with half his team behind? How stupid would you have to-... [[Phantasy Star II|R-Rolf]], why are you beating your head against the wall like that?"'' ~~|'''[[Phantasy Star IV|Chaz]]''', ''[http://www.phantasy-star.net/cwe/conversations5.html Conversations Within Elsydeon]''}}~~

{{quote|''"No no no, you don't understand. You see, I only had one ring left to protect my teammates from being in the Edge, so I had to leave the rest behind. I mean, [[Who Would Be Stupid Enough...?|what kind of idiot]] goes into battle with half his team behind? How stupid would you have to-... [[Phantasy Star II|R-Rolf]], why are you beating your head against the wall like that?"''

|'''[[Phantasy Star IV|Chaz]]''', ''[http://www.phantasy-star.net/cwe/conversations5.html Conversations Within Elsydeon]''}}

Trope common in [[Real Time Strategy]] games, in which the overall number of units or the count of a particular powerful, but not unique unit are limited by assigning a completely arbitrary [[Cap]] to them. This limit is often far lower than what the resources available or the technical limits of the game engine could allow. Particularly ridiculous when the rule can be broken through scenario design or using a perfectly legitimate game feature. Most often implemented as a way to enforce game balance. It can also be a matter of resources; each unit requires not just rendering power but AI, collision, and other intangibles. This can be partially justified by representing the High Command's reluctance to commit too many resources into one battle when you- in theory- have more than enough resources, though this justification [[Fridge Logic|does not work as well when you are fighting THE climatic battle and yet there are only so many units you can deploy.]]

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* The older ''[[Civilization]]'' games had an Arbitrary City Count Limit ([[Powers of Two Minus One|255]] for Civ2, to be specific). The table of cities only had room for 255 entries

** ''Civilization IV'' implements a more typical Cap, forbidding each civilization from having more than three missionaries of a given religion at any given time. However, since missionaries are self-consuming, the limit is not nearly as annoying.

** ''Civilization V'' revamps the resource system to work this way. In the previous two iterations,<ref>The first two games did not have strategic resources implemented as a feature yet.</ref> you just had to ''have'' the resource—eg. you needed Iron to create Swordsmen, because [[~~Useful Notes/Swords|~~Swords]] are [[Captain Obvious|made out of iron]]<ref>Well, technically, steel, but steel is an alloy of carbon and, get this, iron. Unless they're made out of bronze.</ref>—unless you were playing ''Civ3'', at which point the resources depleted at an unexplained rate. As of ''Civ5'', Resources are now an [[Cap|Abritrary Building Limit]] on how many of a thing you can create at once: if you want all six of your cities to spawn Swordsmen but you only have four units of Iron, then two of them will have to do something else.

** ''Civilization V'' revamps the resource system to work this way. In the previous two iterations,<ref>The first two games did not have strategic resources implemented as a feature yet.</ref> you just had to ''have'' the resource—eg. you needed Iron to create Swordsmen, because [[Swords]] are [[Captain Obvious|made out of iron]]<ref>Well, technically, steel, but steel is an alloy of carbon and, get this, iron. Unless they're made out of bronze.</ref>—unless you were playing ''Civ3'', at which point the resources depleted at an unexplained rate. As of ''Civ5'', Resources are now an [[Cap|Abritrary Building Limit]] on how many of a thing you can create at once: if you want all six of your cities to spawn Swordsmen but you only have four units of Iron, then two of them will have to do something else.

*** This can get annoying, as conquering civilizations will tend to have a lot of puppet cities, whose government cannot be influenced for some reason ([[Non-Indicative Name|isn't that the whole point of a puppet government that they do what you want?]]), so they continue to build nuclear power plants when you're desperately need your few uranium deposits to build nukes/submarines/HumongousMecha. There should at least be an option to restrict any construction that requires strategic resources. As the ruler of that civilization, you should have the final say on resource allocation.

* Averted in ''[[Master of Orion]] II''. Each of your star bases would generate a certain number of "Command Points" for your empire, representing the capacity of your logistics to manage, maintain and command ships. All the military ships in your empire counted against the number of Command Points you had, with larger ships costing more. If you happened to exceed your Command Points through overbuilding or loss of facilities, you had to pay for the difference in cash, every turn, until you either replaced/recaptured facilities or reduced the size of your fleet.