If someone doesn't find the game fun there are two likely issues:

1. They don't really understand the game. Often this comes down to not knowing the power of quanta/research/orbitals or not understanding the value of unit composition. Can you come up with scenarios that highlight the depth of these in a way that convinces them that such aspects are more than just "oh isn't that nice" but actually crucial to gameplay depth? Show them how powerful each orbital can be when used right or how the right composition of a small force of units can defeat a much larger force.

2. The game doesn't have what they are looking for. While some just want an iteration of their favorite RTS game, others just consider Ashes to be lacking depth. If it is indeed true that RTS games don't really begin to show off their potential until after months of post-release development, maybe the skeptical can be converted when the game reaches the more mature status. Is it viable to ask people who don't find the game fun to come back in a year?

I am skeptical of the phrase "Both the PHC and the Substrate need more tools to execute more types of strategies." Specifically how your two new units are supposed to help that. These just offer ways of countering enemy compositions, which is a tactical thing. If you want to improve strategic depth units are not the best way unless you are giving them radically different abilities (e.g. teleportation, behavior modification, ridiculous power). Otherwise strategic options mainly come from buildings, economy, orbitals and research. I think you'd be better served by holding off on new units and deeping research instead. The sentry was a decent idea from a strategic standpoint, not because of what the sentry was (mix of brute and archer) but for how it could be used (back-capping and harassment of poorly defended regions).

Here, better tutorials are needed, but that is only part of the problem.  The biggest way to learn how to play is to use replays, not videos.  Replays allow you to slow/stop action and look around.  This is one thing Planetary Annihilation did correctly, and should be used as a model on how replays should be done & offered.

Another thing missing is a "mayhem playground" mode that would be used for learning everything.  That means, you have unlimited amounts of everything, and the AI should slowly at first, send a wave or two at you...getting progressively harder as time goes on.  This allows people to learn how to use everything that AotS offers in their own time.  In this mode, there is no game over, the AI regenerates stronger & stronger attack waves, it just continues forever until the user quits.

This is a catch-all position, obviously the people that don't find this game appealing at its current incarnation are looking for something more that is missing from AotS.

The way many (most people if you look at sales vs online players) people play RTS is mainly for the single player aspect.  This involves a story.  This involves immersion. This makes people associate with what you are controlling and the campaign to get it done.  Relic's RTS games did a good job of this most of the time for example.  The next thing that can make or break a game involves game mechanics, it should make it easy to do what the user wants.

Rather than beating a dead horse about the current story & immersion of AotS (which is supposed to be in the works), people first have to get the game mechanics, and then be able to pick it up quickly.

Unfortunately, AotS makes this much harder for many people because of the many little things that need a ton of polish.  Each item that has issues by itself may not mean much, but, add them all together, and it becomes a big issue.

So, is it good advice to tell people the game isn't quite finished (or "matured") yet?  Well, nobody has to say anything officially, the end product shows, and lots of user reviews also tell this.  There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

That means, to keep the current players interested, they need content to keep them from fading away.

The people that don't have this game yet are waiting for a "GOTY" edition to get a "complete" (more matured) game, though, some will buy if the game is cheap enough--but those players won't stick around that long without new content / issues fixed.

I don't completely understand the "please give reviews part". So far I haven't given a review, because I believe the game is not yet done. If I treat the game in its current state as it was done, I basically MUST give it a negative review. On the other side, I can't give it a positive review because it wouldn't be fair towards potential customers to act as if features were already implemented, that simply aren't yet but hopefully still come.

If I wrote a review now, the negatives would outweigh the positives:

Positive:

Nice lighting effects.

Tons of units available at once.

The interface is, all in all very accessible and allows for interacting efficiently, making playing a round of Ashes somewhat satisfying.

The game runs performant, also and especially the net code. In general, thechnically, I feel this game is very stable.

Moddable engine with a constant flow of small content updates.

Incredible support by the developers.

Lots of maps in all kinds of sizes.

Great AI.

Solid multiplayer experience.

Negative:

Units look bland and it is not clear from looking at them what their role could be. Also their names don't give a clue. What does a Nemesis or an Artemis do? In old Greek Lore, Artemis was the goddess of hunt, so one could think that this could be a sniper unit, but it's the other way around.

Maps lack detail, look barren and empty. One of the biggest let-downs.

It is hard to relate to the units/factions. What is a post human really? How does he or she look like? What are their motives? In Dawn of War I feel like I am freaking Gabriel Angelos and my Chapter is overrun or like I can bring "The Greater Good" to this sector of the universe with my high-tech glass gun units. The motives of PHC and Substrate are unclear to me, all I can do is shrug my shoulders, there is no drama.

Unbalanced maps. Starting on the right/in the East on Deneb WILL make the game harder.

A "meta unit" or "army system" that is unusable. This system is so flawed, that it should not have been integrated into the game at all and should not be advertised. Units are spaced out rather than clustered, making them weaker as to just having one blob that is not integrated into one army.

Deal braker: only two factions.

So for now I would give it a thumbs down. After initially checking it out, I just hardly come back to the game anymore. If you are okay with a negative review, well, I'll gladly post it.

-pac

Moomo:

the negatives might not outnumber the positives, but they're more important to me. If somebody asked me "should I buy this game" I would say no.

You said "Third faction will come in time": This is exactly the problem with my review. I can only review what is there and not what will be there or even what I hope will be there.

-pac

Personally, I am looking for feedback, especially actionable criticism.

I really like Megas feedback because it's actionable.

The problem we're having is finding enough criticism that is actually actionable:

EXAMPLE of actionable criticism:

1. The maps are drab and static that it takes me out of the game
2. The units and buildings are very static which doesn't conform to the quasi-real art style. Are the units meant to be abstract or are they meant to be real?
3. The user interface does not provide sufficient feedback to make me feel like I can effectively construct defenses in a way. For example, when I place a smarty, it should show the ranges of the other smarties so that I can easily create overlapping defenses. 
4. The army system makes me feel like I have almost no control over my units. I have almost no say over the order of battle when attacking another army even if I want to.  I should be able to tell my army to target X, Y, Z in the other army.
5. I don't feel like there are enough units to give me a wide enough set of strategic options. For example, with air I have bombing and air superiority. But there's no real close air support. In warfare, there are lots roles for aircraft that don't exist here.  There's no Cielo type unit in this game (as one example).
6. I don't feel like there's enough single player game styles. There's skirmish and scenarios. But skirmish's have almost no setup options. In TA I could customize each game to the Nth degree. No air units or no nukes or no whatever.  Ashes doesn't let me even affect the resource output of a planet or environmental conditions.

That's the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

But most of the feedback I get is this:

1. I should be able to zoom out and play the entire game with icons views like SupCom.
2. Get rid of the Nexus and replace with a Commander
3. You should have 4 factions, like SupCom, that are all identical but with different graphics.
4. You need wrecks
5. You should get rid of engineers and just have everything auto build itself
6. Get rid of hover units and instead have them be tanks with treads.
7. You need Experimental units.
8. Your buildings should have adjacency bonuses
9. You need to have Naval units. Every game (except StarCraft, WarCraft, Company of Heroes, Grey Goo, Act of Aggression, etc.) has naval units.
10. You need more resources. Like 8 of them or more. 

I've been meaning to write a long article on the vast differences between forum goers and the average gamer.  Examples I've learned (the hard way)

• Very few people play on big maps
• Very few people play on difficulties above easy (forget normal)
• Very few people play multiplayer even in multiplayer focused games
• Very few people play skirmish, they only play the campaign and that's it
• Most people prefer to just build up a base and care relatively little about the tactics

Now, I am much more like a forum goer which is why we all get along so well.  But when it comes to user reviews (and game reviews) the factors above are hurting us.

We have to satisfy the above people's wants too because they represent the bulk of the sales while not alienating our most loyal customers.

imho this game needs more manpower

the game has to grow faster or people may lose interest (even possible buyers!)

I tend to trust our stats more than forum anecdotal evidence.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 14

I tend to trust our stats more than forum anecdotal evidence.

Good grief Charlie Brown, I thought you guys were computer scientists. It's not the stats that are the problem. It's your interpretation of what those stats mean about player preference that is possibly folly. By your same logic people prefer Brutes over Zeus because they are more numerous. Sound ridiculous? Exactly.

Forget it. I'm tired of caring more about this more than you do. I have better things to do.

Thanks for this feedback.

Let me address this in two parts:

First, I like every idea you give here.  Usually someone posts ideas and I think "oh that would be awful" in half the cases.  But in what you posted, I agree with every one of them.

Second, let me walk you through each one and present the challenges:

Re sharing  player made maps seamlessly.

This won't be easy any time soon because a map is 140MB in size on average.  People will have to, for the time being, share maps the same way they do in other games, which is through mod sites.  Eventually we'll have Steamworks support for this to allow people to do this.  But there won't be a case in the near term where the host is transferring a 140MB file to several people.  

Re map features like lakes and rivers.

This is more of a cosmetic thing.  Something we want to have but it will be awhile because we can either have more map detail or more map environments on a single map because of video memory.

RE MP options

More quick-match options.  Agree here.  People just aren't creating custom games like we thought. Everyone seems to wait for other people to do it. It's a little frustrating to see a bunch of people online and just waiting.  So this will need to be done.

Re cosmetic skins

They're coming but it'll be awhile.

IMHO, the army system is a brilliant breakthrough that will be copied in every future RTS. But it needs a lot of work to make it so players can use it efficiently.

I've only played a handful of games so far, but my main gripe is that the UI for unit selection is broken. The way armies and control groups interact is a muddle. I can have an army, and I can have a control group, and those two things can be different. Is there really a use-case for this kind of functionality? If so then there needs to be a better way to visually differentiate between armies. And armies should also be represented by a single-icon in the control group on the side.

On that same note, if I reinforce an army those units will be generated all over the map. But I am also building units, and summoning units to multiple different armies. Right now, there's no visual indication to tell me where a unit is going or whether it's part of an army. What happens to me multiple times in a game is that I will be building a new army (by queuing units manually) and reinforcing my existing armies. When my new army reaches an appropriate size, I'll draw a box to select all the new units, create a new army and assign it to a control group.

Can you guess what happens when I do that?

Some of the units I selected in the box would be reinforcements and so my selection would grab them AND THEIR ARMY. Of course, that army is on the other side of the map, so I have no idea. And when I made my army and my control group I dissolved my existing army (or several) and control group (or several) and joined them all into one.   

To make it even more infuriating, this new super-army will immediately attempt to re-form around the strongest unit in the army, which might be anywhere. That often means that armies fighting on the front lines will break off their attack, laboriously turn around, and head off randomly. And the simple fact is that I might not even notice.  (Wait where'd the defensive army I planted on my southern flank go?)

Now maybe I am unaware of some UI mechanics that could help me, but my suggestions are the following

1. When you have selected units that are not on the screen there needs to be a visual indication that units are off the screen (and which direction)
2. Drag-select, should not pick reinforcement units.
3. Reinforcement units should have some visual indication that that's what they are (both in the building queue and on the screen).
4. Making a control-group should be the equivalent of making an army - that is it should merge those units into an army automatically - unless multiple armies are selected.
5. (edit) If a control-group has multiple armies in it, those should be signified by army-type icons, rather than breaking down all the units in the control-group.
6. (edit) There needs to be some visual indication to differentiate army groups. Just a dot of color might be enough. Red team and Blue team! Go!

Not memory as much as disk space. 

The answer: No real optimization yet in that area.

Just a heads up. I started about a dozen matches of Proving Grounds today while working on some ideas for a scenario. I thought I'd let you know in case you happen to look at my stats and come to the mistaken conclusion that I prefer tiny maps.