Planets Limit Ships Game Settings Available

We have recently completed adding support for "Planets Limit Ships" (PLS) games. PLS games replace the global ship limit with an individual limit based on how many planets a player controls. This different approach takes some focus off of the build queue and ship slots, and rewards those who can capture planets and grow their empire. This is a game feature the community has been testing out on their own, and you have probably seen many discussions about it in the past. We are happy to now offer some better tools to support these games!

Here are the relevant new game settings:

- Ship Limit Type: Set to "Planets Limit Ships" to enable a PLS game.

- PLS Min Ships: The amount of ships any empire can support, regardless of how many planets they own.

- PLS Ships Per Planet: The number of ships each planet can support. This is typically set to 1, meaning every planet you have lets you have one more ship.

- PLS Extra Ships: Each empire can support this many ships in addition to the ships received for the planets owned.

So the formula for how many ships you can own is the greater of

[PLS Min Ships]

or

#of planets owned * [PLS Ships Per Planet] + [PLS Extra Ships]

(The interface shows you how many ships you have and how many you currently support on the starbase ship building screens, so you don't need to calculate this yourself)

If you are at your limit, or go over it (by losing planets), you will not be able to build any more ships until you are under your limit again. If you are at or over you limit, you will also not be able to take ships from other players with the following results:

- A ship transfer via gsX friendly code will fail and the ship will remain under control of its current owner.

- Ship captures via Force Surrender, capture in combat, or tow capture will result in the ship being destroyed.

PBx friendly codes can still be used to specify which bases you want to build first, with build order random otherwise. Priority points are not used in PLS games.

For game hosts, a couple other settings we recommend using for PLS games:

- Enable Cloning = false (otherwise players can always clone ships, which is very powerful)

- Must Match GSx = true (to prevent exploit of giving an enemy a bunch of junk ships to stop them from building)

Other changes included in this release:

- We have removed the starting Hive from the Horwasp, to reduce their early game strength some.

- Also included is a bug fix for Horwasp where their ships would sometimes take less damage than they should from glory devices or mine hits.

- In Wandering Tribes games where all ships start in the center of the map, incremental Fight or Fail will now not become active until turn 30.