Theoretically the C4 engine will allow for unlimited terrain sizes, with seamless paging of terrain from disk (when the terrain engine is complete). Whether that is practical (due to some technical limitation) is unknown. The game play aspects of that are not in our design vision. We're looking to very large maps not because we want arbitrarily large worlds, but because we want to see realistic deployment of a variety of assets.
Jets don't really make sense in PR1, they are very gamey. Artillery doesn't really make sense. Even helicopters are not realistic in the current sized BF2 terrain.
We've thought about aspects of fuel consumption being relevant, so we'll probably accelerate fuel consumption so that Helicopters and such need to consider time to and time on target. Additionally we want to see supply aspects play a larger role. Logistics of a variety of types will be an important aspect of PR2. ArmA Warfare mode with the WACO mod and ACE is a very cool game mode imo. But ArmA itself has innumerable barriers to being a great multiplayer game. A lot of the concepts of Warfare and CnC mode will be incorporated into PR2. We'll probably have other game modes, but there will be a core concept of how PR2 is played that will be more like a real time version of the PR Tournament than the typical public PR server.
There will eventually be bots in PR2, at least with our current thinking. Bots will do stuff like man defensive positions (which will be placed like PR1), anti air positions, drive supply trucks etc. Boring stuff that players don't want to do all the time. Current thinking is also that anything a bot can do, a human player can do as well .. but the bots are available (likely at a logistical cost of some sort).
We're shooting for 100+ players broken into 8 man squads with a commander per team. So 98 players would be 6 x 8 man squads + 1 Commander + Bots. If we can get it beyond that, we will. But destructible networked environments eat up resources. And those are cool
The nature of map size and layout will be affected by the type of assets we want to see deployed. So, for example, a map with jets will be extremely large.. with significant chunks of it just to facilitate there being jets wth somewhat realistic airfield layouts and such. Jets are likely quite low on the initial priority list. It'll start with Infantry, Jeeps, APCs, Supply Trucks and some sort of Helicopters.
I'd say that when we can do those vehicle types (a single type of each to start with) with superb Infantry play and fairly high fidelity simulation of the vehicles we'd look for some money from you lot to play it
But there will be a lot of playable alphas and betas for a long time before we get anywhere near that.
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