A legion of a hundred and twenty-eight

Until the end of October a private room of Frantumi held a crew: two to sixteen players on one field, eight ships in the air at a time and the rest on the bench, because beyond eight ships the melee stops being readable. The bench stops at sixteen for a reason of the same kind, since past that number the average wait of the player sitting out grows longer than the time spent flying.

The room now grows past the crew without breaking either rule. A room of two fleets seats thirty-two, an armada of four seats sixty-four, and a legion of eight fleets seats a hundred and twenty-eight. Each fleet flies on a field of its own, with its own eight ships in the air and its own bench, and fleets do not shoot at one another: they race the same waves, the score is the fleet's, and the match ends with a standing of the fleets and a verdict. The screen a player sees is still one field with eight ships on it, which is the point. The legion is many crews that compete, not one field with a hundred and twenty-eight ships lost in it.

These are private rooms, with the same six-digit codes and the same rules of entry as the co-op room, and they run through the studio's own arbitration server whether Steam is there or not; the Steam invite only carries the code. The whole chain, from the crew to the legion, was built in the two days before the end of October and has been run against that server with synthetic clients, so the numbers that matter, the size of a snapshot and the time of a step with a legion in the room, are measured. What has not happened yet is a legion of people, which no fleet of machine pilots stands in for, and that proof is written down as still owed.

The second trailer on the game's page, from the duel to the legion, shows the climb from four ships to eight fleets.