How big should teams be?

[Anomalous]

Depends. The numbers which you give seem to be ideals – I'd allow ₆₀% more than you say, at least for the maps which you name there even though that would lead to more need for defence. However, I disagree with the minimum for the likes of Transit – that one in particular needs at least 12 players, I think.

[kharnov]

Let's all concentrate on the maps that will likely be in beta. So far, the core maps of Unvanquished are going to be:

• Plat23

• Thunder

• Parpax

• Yocto

• Zack's medical facility

[janev]

anomalous, those were ideal numbers for players per team in case it was not clear.

[Viech]

When designing maps we should aim for two sizes: One that plays well with the number of players in a range that is common for scrims (4vs4 - 6vs6) and one that (still) plays well with a larger number of players as common on popular public servers. The maximum number depends on our gameplay design and technical limitations but I think for the moment we can take 20vs20 as an upper boundary.
In order to have a long living and passionate comunity we should favor clans and "professional" playing styles (easy games get boring fast) and thus have many maps that play well with 4-6 players per team. Apart from that we need to have atleast one map that plays well as a 2vs2 to support small lan partys / a handful of friends playing together.

Using the Tremulous GPP gameplay as a reference, these are my expectations of an ideal number of players per team:

• Plat23
  2-8

• Parpax
  4-10

• Thunder
  8-?

[Anomalous]

That wasn't so much not clear as completely absent…

[Cadynum]

4v4 is the minimum for a game to be playable in trem. 1 builder/defender and 3 attackers. I don't think it's desirable to push it lower than that.

[norfenstein]

Okay, it's clear that we think ideal player size is largely map-dependent, but what we need to decide here is what target size (assuming that player load and map size will scale together) the game as whole is meant for, as in what player sizes are going to be playtested and guaranteed to be fun. If we want to say six through sixty, that's fine, but it will be a lot more work and probably a lot more difficult to balance than focusing on a smaller range.

I would say that 3v3 was the minimum that Tremulous was playable, but whether or not games that small were balanced or not wasn't a great concern for us. Likewise for very large games (5 versus 5 was actually the sweet spot according to the balance graph). Unvanquished could pick two ranges to shoot for: an "ideal" size range for teams/maps, and a "playable" range outside of which no guarantees are made.

[janev]

Sweet spot 5v5-6v6 on most maps. Most of the testing can be done with these numbers, that is a competetive game range.

However not everyone will agree so it should be playable with 4v4 on a smaller map and playable in up to a 10v10 on a very large map. If a few players per team, in either direction, breaks the balance horribly something needs to be rebalanced. It means the special abilities are out of whack IMHO. The melee (alien) team in particular needs a gimmick to give them strength in numbers, to counter ranged damage and concentrated fire, as the team size increases.

[Ishq]

4v4 to 7v7 is optimal for midsized to larger maps. Anything more is probably playable, but all bets are off.

[kharnov]

Classify maps for playtesting based off roughly three generalized size categories. An example of a small map would be ATCS, while a medium map would be Tremor, and a large map would be Transit. For playtesting purposes, I would suggest at minimum approximately 4 players per team for small maps, 5-6 for medium maps, and 7-10 for large maps. The reason this goes up at larger map sizes is due to the lowered probability of coming across an opponent.