On a good day, StarCraft 2 lets you have over 4,000 units on screen at any one time. That’s a lot to keep track of, but it’s nothing compared to what Planetary Annihilation will offer. How about a million units on the map at once, all scrapping it out in realtime?

That’s what Uber Entertainment's co-founder and chief technology officer Jon Mavor tells Red Bull UK the team are planning for their ambitious new RTS (real time strategy game), which smashed its original Kickstarter goal by more than US $1m last year, raising $2.23m in total. Imagine a war game spread across an entire star system, where scores of factions face off on fronts light years apart. That’s what Mavor’s shooting for.

"A million units, think about it: it's a pretty significant number of units spread across a significant number of planets - that would be a huge, huge game,” he says. "The whole engine architecture from the ground up has been designed with this kind of thing in mind. A million units, 40 players. These are the kind of experiences I want to try to enable to let people have them."

The new game owes more than a little bit of credit to RTS classic Total Annihilation, as well as that game's spiritual successor , Supreme Commander - both titles that many of the Uber staff worked on in the past. Mavor himself worked on the Total Annihilation engine, alongside Uber CEO Bob Berry and Michael Robbins, a man whose homemade AI mod “Sorian” for Supreme Commander landed him a job working on the game itself.

The list doesn’t stop there either. Another Uber founder, design director John Comes, came from Westwood, the legendary studio behind Command & Conquer, the series that made the RTS a genre in its own right. You could say Uber’s formed its own strategy game dream team, in other words.

It’s not the only genre they work in, mind. Washington-based Uber’s best known game since it was formed in 2008 is Monday Night Combat, a 2010 team-based third person shooter with MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena - think League of Legends ) that’s more Running Man than C&C: Red Alert.

Given the team’s CVs though, a return to RTS was inevitable, Mavor says. "I felt like I wanted to explore some more RTS stuff, and I had this idea rattling around in my head to go with some 3D planetary-type stuff, and then Bob Berry came to me and said we should really do something on Kickstarter, and I said, 'what would we do?' We made a pitch video, which took about three months to put together, and we worked through a lot of issues of what we were going to show, and it turns out there's demand for this."

There certainly is if you announce plans for a game 250 times bigger than Blizzard’s StarCraft 2, the current king of RTS. With Planetary Annihilation, the whole solar system is yours to take over: you grab resources from various planets to expand your empire, and you can create huge armies to take on rival systems and win the Galactic War.

You're able to play out huge, large scale battles that Jon hopes will include up to 40 players, or you can just take to a single planet and play a quick fight with friends - the scalability of the game and the engine is what sets the title apart from other games. You can have anything from a small skirmish to an intergalactic armageddon on the scale of Eve Online , but with much more action and fewer spreadsheets. Mavor’s making sure the game is scalable, above all else.

"I want scalability in the game, that's a huge deal, and I want what's going on in the game world to reflect the state of the game. I want you to be able to look at the gameworld and see what's going on. Not have to rely on charts and numbers and all these other stuff, and just play the game by proxy - play the game by playing the game,” he says.

Mavor and his team might be shooting for the stars, but there are plenty of rival studios and games there to contend with already. The current heavy hitters in the RTS genre include StarCraft 2, which has a huge online fanbase and a massive esport presence, as well as Company of Heroes and Sega’s Total War series - but Mavor’s not worried about the competition. If anything, he’s hoping Planetary Annihilation will reach a whole new audience of gamers yet to experience the delights and fiendish difficulties of the RTS genre.

“I think this type of RTS game is a unique - in particular, the mass scale RTS genre, in which the ball has been dropped a little bit. I think there's a huge market out there of players that have been playing StarCraft, League of Legends, Dota and so on who wouldn't actually mind a RTS game that has a little more scale and complexity - there's not too many of these kind of games out there to play with."

"When we show people what the game can be like, we’re going to get some other fans too. We're really trying to build stuff into the engine in terms of flexibility to make it so that we can play the games in different ways and add features that most RTS games in the past haven't been able to do, things like Join In Progress, you know, teams you can join and leave, all this kind of stuff.”

"There's a lot of really interesting technical innovations we're trying to bring to the genre, and some of those are going to open up new, varied types of gameplay that we can't anticipate right now,” - stuff like Chrono Cam, a DVR-style feature that makes the most of cloud computing to let you rewind a match and watch a replay while you’re still in the game.

Unusually, Mavor and his team are bucking the trend towards free to play with Planetary Annihilation, which will be a $40 (£25) retail game when it launches for PC, Mac and Linux in December. They’ve already been there, done that, and decided it’s not for them. Last year’s MNC follow up, Super Monday Night Combat, was a free to play game spurred by the success of League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2 , but it never really gained traction.

"I'm not convinced that was the right way to go, or any of us were. We'd call it an experiment that we learned a lot from. It wasn't super financially successful, but we really wanted to try new stuff. We wanted to experiment and thought it would be fun to get in on that business model."

Instead, Mavor’s focusing on the hardcore fans with Planetary Annihilation, the ones who backed it, and plan on modding the game and improving on the team’s hard work.

"After the game ships, we expect to basically be supporting the mod community and the rest of the community, adding more online features, tweaking the balance and so on into the future. We don't see Planetary Annihilation as a just a game, we see it as a platform that is going to evolve. We expect the community to build more games on top of the game."

Unit Scale © Uber Entertainment

With the game nearing completion, what's next for the team? Where will they be a year from now?

"We hope that the game is out, tons of people are playing it, we're hoping that people will build some cool single player campaigns and total conversions,” Mavor says. “After that, I'd hope we'd have some more games out and more games built on the engine. I'd hope the engine has evolved so you can do anything with it, so the community can build crazy stuff. There's nothing more I'd like to see than innovation on top of what we're currently doing. Dota is the classic example, as that was built on WarCraft 3. If somebody was to build something amazing on top of our stuff, and that came into fruition, I'd be pretty happy about that."

Uber’s recently announced Toy Rush, a new tower-defence style game that's set to hit mobiles and tablets, but what about Planetary Annihilation on mobile or tablets ? Would it even be technically possible?

Mavor tells us, "I think it's theoretically possible, and the hardware specs are constantly getting better, so I don't see why it couldn't be done. We've wanted to do mobile stuff, and the engine for Planetary Annihilation is pretty portable and pretty flexible, so the Monday Night Combat spin-off iOS title Outland Games, actually runs on the same engine that PA does."

“There might even be some other interesting things included too because the game is so server based, we could probably do a lite-client to let you spectate games that are running on a PC, and things like that, which could be the first step. But I can see going tablet in the future - we're pretty happy to work on whatever platform people want to play on, and I think touchscreen would be amazing for it. "