Any insight into this at all? Even a rough estimate would be great!

Not before release.

Really Fred? So Supreme Commander is just StarCraft + zoom out to icons? Is that really the position you want to take?

The zoom out level in the current version is the intended zoom out.  I have stated since the Founder's program that the game would never ever have a bunch of icons when zoomed out.

I, and others here, are big SupCom fans. I get pretty annoyed when so-called SupCom fans presume to speak for me and the thousands of others SupCom fans on what we will like or not like.  I can assure you, most SupCom fans will like this game. I suspect we (Stardock/Oxide dev team) have far more hours into SupCom than most of those clamoring to turn Ashes into RTS Panzer general.

You are certainly welcome to your own preferences. But don't presume to speak for other SupCom fans.

We may eventually allow players to set their own zoom out level in settings.ini.  But it is not in our immediate plans.

You continue to think you speak for SupCom players generally.   You are welcome to your opinions. I don't agree with them.  I assume you're playing Supreme Commander 2 right? Otherwise, you also disagree with GPG with the direction of SupCom itself.

Zooming out to a bunch of tiny dots isn't in the plan. You are welcome to your opinion regardless of how aggressively wrong it is.

FAF is out there. People still play it.  If you want to watch dots on the screen or order dots around, then there are games that do that.

But as I've said, from the very start:

This. Isn't. What. Ashes. Is. About.

I need that on a t-shirt.

I an a huge fan of Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance (Supreme Commander 2 was terrible IMO). There are many things about SupCom that I do not want to see corrupting AotS's game-play.

I zoom out further only so I can quickly zoom back in to another area on the map, as I have always found this to be more intuitive and faster than holding the mouse button and dragging the map across half a dozen times or clicking on a minimap to get to the other side of the map. I couldn't care less if there were icons, dots or nyan cats flying around on the screen.

Yea, I've been hearing that for 20 years.  

On the other hand, I'm the one and only person who decides what's in the game. So perhaps a different approach might be in order in trying to make your case for a particular feature.

We have spent many months experimenting with different zoom levels. The current zoom is the final zoom. You can already zoom,out very far. But we are not looking to make the game play as a situation map of the world ala supcom:FAf

As I've said previously, we will look at adding a zoom distance parameter to settings.ini. But it won't turn the view into icons or dots. Just further zoom.

I also know ten-fifteen unverified people who unanimously agree that people should speak for themselves not others (who may or may not exist). If it is important to them, they should voice their own opinions. Preferably in a respectful manner.

I think I just threw up a little.

I do like the game the way it is now with that Zoom, I care more about other things in the game than a stupid SupCom Zoom, don't take it wrong, I Loved the Zoom in Supcom1/2 but i move on, the way AOTS its made i will not like to have a Strategic Zoom like SupCom so no Thx!

Mered4, FredN, and some other players in here talking about how important is to have a Strategic Zoom ala SupCom and most of us want it, well i do not and some other players think the same as me.

I do not want to see ants moving across a screen, why? I wont even know what kind of ants they are, so no I am not interested, I even made a Bunch of Mock Ups, design, and tests for AOTS that show different ways of zoom or Strategic zoom with no Icons or different Icons and it does not work at all.

The Dev's need to make a complete new streamlined way for that Strategic zoom to really work, and to do that they need to change so many things in the game to make it work, and who knows, it may destroy the game. So if you ask me then, I will say no. If the Dev's don't get into it 100% then don't even try to make a bad strategic zoom.

Frogboy already said that he will add it in the .ini File in the future and good luck playing with it, I want to see if it make you a better player having Strategic zoom with ants all over the map.

P.S. I don't even need the settings.ini to get that Strategic zoom in the game. It's already there.

look at it!

Thank you.

No RTS of this scale gives a damn about 'the action.'  If you want action, zoom in.  No one forces you to play at max zoom 100% of the time.

That's not why I play an RTS.  If I wanted action, I'd go play Dirty Bomb or Planetside.  I'm here for the Strategy part.  Strat zoom is a massive advantage vs someone who does not have it. 

Personally, I have had it up to here *vaguely gestures above head* in people who claim that fighting the UI is just as important as fighting the enemy.

  Planetary Annihilation has utterly destroyed every single RTS for me because of this. It's just elegant to micro hundreds of units in seconds, or macro bases in less time.  I come to Ashes, where there is no strat zoom, no round planets, and little in the way of area commands or easy to use engineer assistance.  It feels like a step back.  Scratch that:  a MASSIVE step back.  Like I've been taken back to the 90s.

Do I have high standards for this genre?  Sure.  PA has crap tons of problems in itself, and so does FAF.  The primary one with FAF being that it stops being fun unless you really get into it.  Nothing is perfect.

But, as I said earlier, I'm just done with devs promising these large scale massive battle extraordinary games and not delivering.  If you don't have Strat Zoom, it's not like SupCom.  If you don't have tech levels, it's not like TA.  If you have to fight the UI, it's not worthy of being compared to the Annihilation series.  So long as developers cling to these misguided notions, the genre will never advance.  Seriously, Frogboy.  Icons are your pet peeve for some reason, and you make them out to be this huge problem.  I don't get it.  If you want to play Starcraft or C&C, go play them.  Ashes was supposed to be about large scale fights, not looking at a large scale fight from up close.  Your game may be pretty, but my friends and I don't play games for their looks.  If we did, we would all be salivating over Grey Goo.

The other key thing I'm seeing here is Frogboy clinging to his idea as if it's the last thing he'll do before dying.  Why not be flexible?  Ashes isn't about icons - it's about large scale fights on a never before seen level.  Give us a modern zoom level so we can all experience the beauty of AOTS.

I say all this, but I'm fairly certain the real reason behind all this ridiculous opposition to Strat Zoom is that the game simply cannot handle that many units on screen at one time.  I've borked the zoom to max before on accident and nearly crashed my game at around 2-3k units.  PA does that without breaking a sweat, and it's an older engine with spheres.  Something is fishy here.  And don't tell me it's the polygon count. That much is obvious. The question is how ya'll are going to fix it.

Don't you see the irony here?

Plus you keep saying you want "strategy" but having a higher level of zoom will not contribute any new level of strategy to the game. How much have you actually played it?

In this area, personal taste is irrelevant.  Strat zoom is simply better than what we have now in every single way.  There are no downsides.  We can forego having icons - that is something Frogboy and crew have been adamant about from the start.  The point is to have the strat zoom, and give the players the tools to wage this war on even larger maps.  

And sure, maybe AOTS was built for this zoom level.  That means it's not the expandable environment that Stardock has been selling us.  It won't last like FAF has, or how PA will.  Hell, FAF could have been bigger, but they coded the engine with artificial limits.  You want an engine that will last for years?  Build PA, but fix its flaws and terrible marketing strategy. Don;t try to *innovate* by doing something someone else has done for years, but more popular.  At least be honest about it.

Perhaps next time Stardock tries to make an RTS, they should be more open about the fact that this isn't about large, scalable battles.  This is about creating the pet RTS that they've wanted for years.  Personally I cannot wait to get some fresh, young minds in this industry so we can finally move on from this up-close zoom limitation BS.  Think bigger, for chrissake.  Uber dared to dream big with PA - and they didn't do the best job.   But at least they built their dream without misleading anyone as to the nature of their game.  

Ashes isn't a game about large armies.  It's a game about squads of units in large formations shooting eachother for the sake of a pretty lightshow.  

Frogboy, I'm not some PA fanboy like Tatsu is a FAF fanboy.  I'm trying to apply the lessons learned from both those games to ashes, and you keep coming back with *but we aren't them.*   Dude, DUH.  Ignoring the mistakes and successes of those past titles is a terrible decision.  

If that is what you think, you make it sound like you don't like the game, and adding zoom to the game is not going to change those battles between "squads" as you put it, it just means you can jump between them in a different way or perhaps see more of them at once, neither of which effects how the game ultimately plays.

You cannot say zoom out is objectively better in every single way. I have seen posts saying they prefer the current method over SupCom. So are they objectively wrong and you are objectively right? You are as rigid in your thoughts as you accuse the Devs, even more so really.

Huge SupCom FA and StarCraft fan here, and really? The zoom was what you think seperates these games? What about streaming eco, setting up engineer build ques before funds are available, actual ballistics (if a bullet misses its target, it could still damage the target behind it), and army size I currently have both games going on my computer, and I keep going to Ashes over SupCom and Starcraft. Ashes is an amazing hybrid that plays differently than anything else I've tried. I would only use a strat zoom for faster movement, but really, I'm starting to get around the big maps of Ashes faster than SupCom anyways. You use different methods is all. From other comments, I am curious how much time you have put into Ashes. And I'm talking about playtime, not forums. I hated SupCom until I spent time and fully learned the game, now I love it.

Ashes: Multiple armies each numbering in the hundreds with no unit cap

SupCom: Army cap of 750 minus your buildings

StarCraft: Army of 30-100ish depending on unit mix

Frogboy: Thank you for the work on the game, I don't care about the zoom, could you improve pathfinding instead?