Hmmm, JP, how will handle ship sells (and destroy in case of pod) with the pools?

If a private ship get sell/destroy it frees a private slot and if a public ship get destroy it frees a public slot?

Do private get converted to public when public slot free up?

I'd say if you've used your private pool, any sale or #SD# replenishes your private pool, and after that, replenishes the public pool.

When I've discussed this in the past, the emphasis seemed to be on keeping the Corp ship pool large enough that there would never be any sense of being limited. That's why that was my priority. I don't know at what point some players might feel that they're being too limited in their Corp ship allotment.

But yeah, as Remote showed, there are other ways to set these numbers, so probably the best thing is to keep it all configurable. If you go to 500 players, you're going to have to settle for fewer per-Corp ships.

Sounds fine. A little more work, but what the heck ;)

Here are the current problems that occur in games that have high ship or planet counts:

1) Data corruption (I've seen this in a lot of edits with aliens that last very long)

2) Server lag and high CPU spikes

3) If the number of ships reaches the maximum then ships aren't available and new or ship destroyed players get locked out of the game.

Whatever maximum amount you use has to be a number that can't be reached by the players in the game, and the higher the number gets, the more likely you will get corrupted data. I'd much rather have a stable server than allow every player to have a crap load of ships.

Right. The point of this approach is to keep the total ship count small, but at the same time, guarantee that if someone else buys up a load of ships, you'll still have access to some yourself. If I just increased the total number of ships available, that would allow a single player to attempt to overload the system by buying up ships.

Data corruption caused by too many ships is something I really should identify and fix, because if data is becoming corrupt with a lot of ships, it's probably becoming corrupt, though less often, with a few ships. I don't think the number of ships causes the problem, it just makes it much more obvious.

I don't think that it's the actual number of ships that cause the corruption but the changing of ownership of ships. (Captures, selling, buying, destroying, etc.)
You are correct, the more ships that change ownership the more apt it is to happen.

Yes, I agree, buyout-limiting should be the default setting.