Over in this forum topic we had a server operator who wanted to restrict the 'maxplayers' setting, because their server had limited resources and couldn't cope with 30 AIs; they wanted at most 10 players.

Currently, there's no way for server operators to impose this sort of restriction short of (a) adding a locked setting in their ruleset(s) (from 2.3.x onwards), or (b) recompiling.

We currently have infrastructure for locking settings in rulesets, and I think it would be fairly trivial to add a server command to do something similar. However, that would lock 'maxplayers' down to a single setting (10), whereas what we ideally want is to restrict the range of 'maxplayers' from 1-30 to 1-10. This would require some complicated syntax, and wouldn't generalise to enum or string settings.

(Or we could decide that the number of players / AIs is a special case, and provide some solution that allows operator control of the limit, say an 'admin'-level setting that restricted the max.)