I play on absolute minimum settings, and get ~30-40 fps on singleplayer, maxing out at around 25 hearthlings last time I checked.
Seeing as there are double the number of players, and so the number of hearthlings, will I need to halve the number of new hearthlings I take on to maintain performance?
IF your internet is fast enough, its basicly just a vase of how much can the host and client machine handle.
can you handle 40 lings? then two people can each use 20 lings.
does you machine do fine at 20 but catch fire at 21? cap all lings at 10. (for two people)
see it as one big player, that has a lot of lings spread out across the map. (for better performance, spawn close to each other, like, right on top each other works best)
So if the host has a better PC than me, we could theoretically have more 'lings?
I think so, the hosts pc takes the biggest load as far as I know, @rellys would know the official answer I think?
Yes, the host should be the machine that has better specs, that should help with the performance. It is also recommended that the host has good upload speed, since it will be sending data to all the clients.
Ok, thanks for the clarification!