Homeworld doesnt have hundreds of ships? Getting fed up of these worthless comments
Lets put this to rest finally.
Consider a 6 player high unit cap game of HW2, where everyone goes for fighters within 5mins you could easily have 20 squads of 5-6 fighters x 6 players = 600 - 700 fighters plus capitalships plus resource collectors plus rocks. So yes the Homeworld line of games can and does have hundreds of ships + visible objects at the same time.
I'm not an Eve player so I can't comment on that, but I have had 300 ships in an X3 sector at the same time + 1000's out of sector. So yes a space SIM can and does have hundreds of ships + visible objects at the same time.
IC are close I feel to the happy medium between SIM & RTS regarding graphical quality but they aren't quite there yet as some objects are lagging behind others that have reached that standard.
Its not so much that the models aren't as good as they could be, lets not pussy foot about here, its that many of the models aren't as good as they should be. Some make the grade others do not and its a matter of opinion which and I personally do not want to see a fair number of these ships in the final release exactly as they appear now.
If some players have an average PC that needs to scale back on bump mapping, texture detail, polygon counts to keep acceptable frame rates then that needs to be an option.