Kraydl and I have come up with an exciting new game mode I’m for now calling war. You basically have two sides, each with one or more starbases, which can launch carriers which in turn provide bases for and launch player controlled fighters. The objective is to destroy all enemy starbases. Everytime a starbase is destroyed it lowers the enemy population cap so the games have a distinct start and end.
Players buy carrier ships which serve as mobile bases. I think that will be a lot of fun since you will have a sense of ownership over your base. Since only teams buy carriers and multiple teams can share carriers it’s likely you can have entire squads of 50 people play together.
The mode is designed for blocks of 200 players at a time. It can support any number of players since I just spawn more starbases to support them.
My original bandwidth estimates show I can support 4000 players with 100 bytes per second per player where each packet is relayed to 10 guys. This uses about half the outgoing bandwidth cap. Most likely a chaotic zone like this is going to relay every command to 40 guys, so that cuts down the cap to 1000 players. Which is still quite good. No other game that I know of supports meaningful interaction between that many players at once. As starbases are destroyed less players are in the zone so I may be able to increase that number.