Reccomended Settings For Multiplayer

Hi All

I have been playing the beta for several weeks now and really enjoying the experience. In trying different options out it has become apparent that there are limitations to what you can get away with online without the game becoming a sluggish and ultimately frustrating experience. What I would like to see is some form of system/connection analyzer incorporated into the game to prevent unrealistic setups for online games. Here's an example.

Two Player vs Two A.I

Medium Map size

Machines Spec: i7 920, 6gb Ram, GTX 680 Graphicscards.

Connection Spec: ADSL2 10mbit/768K. Ping 125 (due to being in New Zealand). Line Quality A (Speedtest.net)

Now with this high end spec you can get away with normal fleet sizes but go for large fleets and the game won't handle it. The question is whether this is a cpu bottleneck or a upload bandwidth bottleneck? Perhaps if we had a guide on min/max number of players over different upload rates we could ensure games are always good fun even in the latter stages when there's heaps going on.

ADSL/ADSL2 = maximum 768k upload

Cable = 2mbit or 10mbit upload

Fibre Optic = 10mbit or 100mbit upload.

I realise that there are probably a number of options available in other countries but in little old NZ we are 99% on ADSL/ADSL2 which is limited to the 768K upload rate. LAN's will be awesome for this game but online it would be nice to know the limits before we start instead of playing 3 hours and then discovering our game is going to run crap and deciding to give up. I look forward to hearing what others have found.

  P.S both players ping less than 15ms to the local exchange and i'm guessing the 125 ping is due to having to report to a USA master server?