We plan to allow for zooming out pretty far.  We do not plan to put icons onto the main map.  We're more likely to support dual monitors and allow players to expand the mini map onto that.

zooming out.

Well we dont now yet what is think to that.

But indeed ,we need something to understand  what we are click!

Iff 4k units in field ,how will we  select the different types of units with zoom out...

Watching this just has an ex:

Maybe we dont need icons!

Or maybe we need!

I think that's going to draw a couple of issues for some players, yet at the same time your points on realism (and lore) have made me like the game enough to pre-purchase it (sight unseen, or more correctly, gameplay untested).

I see this as a double edged sword and it leads me to ask: will it be possible to enable/disable a HUD for when the zoom gets so far out you enter "tactical"/"satellite" mode (which is more of a game thing than a real world thing, but surely it'd be low-level tech by the lore of the game)?  It may seem like a strange request, but there's some profound joy in watching a series of ant-like units smash at one another from space (rather than always overlaying).  I'd like to think the engine is capable of turning on/off things like that, but I'd also understand if LOD handling involved switching out when we left viable optical range.

TA's community patch by now has something that gets as close to a strategic zoom as it can get in TA.

http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43735

Basically they managed to make it so you can zoom out on the main view to a large minimap that shows somewhat decent icons and you can zoom in at whatever location you want again.

This kind of feature is really key to getting an overview.

I guess it somewhat comes down to:

How do you want players to navigate around the map?

Scroll at edges?

Using camera hotkeys?

Click the minimap?

Zoom out, get an overview and zoom in somewhere else again?

Well I guess if you have a minimap in the game that has icons and stuff and you have a somewhat moddable UI the first thing I will look into is making it work like in the TA community patch.

One other thing I want to bring up that is a bit of a delicate topic and that is the game industry as a business and how it relates to these games.

Total Annihilation was developed by Cave Dog and published by GT Interactive.  

Supreme Commander 1/2 was developed by GPG and published by THQ and Square respectively.

The point being, in the old publishing model, the studio couldn't really commit to long-term support because the games were funded by a third party and that third party had a lot of say over the design (as seen with SupCom 2 and Square).

Ashes of the Singularity, by contrast, is owned by Stardock and being developed by Stardock Oxide together.  

What this means is that we are already committed to Ashes of the Singularity plus expansions/updates for the next 7 years.  We can do that because we fund our own stuff. We're not reliant on a publisher to keep this up.

So when, we hope, the RTS community that loved TA/SupCom/etc. so much begins to get into Ashes, they'll know that they're not going to be abandoned (and by that I specifically mean that new development will be directed at this game for years to come non-stop).  We are doing a lot of work to make sure modding and community expansion to what we do is not just possible but somewhat approachable.

In short, the game will evolve over the next decade based on the people who actually end up buying the game because, in essence, THEY are the ones funding the future, not a publisher.

I understand where you are coming from. Nevertheless my current feeling, based on the few infos I have on the game, tells me that people will want the zoom. Yes they will need to zoom in as well, but the main advantage of the zoom is more about navigating the battlefield and getting an overview. In SupCom you usually would zoom in to manage your units as well and people were fine with that.

We'll see in the early access. I would guess that if you are trying to appeal to the TA/SupCom crowd you will hear comments like "we need the full zoom with icons" quite a lot and, assuming your UI is moddable enough, you will probably see me mod it in as well, I like to mod in stuff that is missing from games. Like I added a notifications-minimap to Planetary Annihilation

When I think about issues with terrain features where you cannot see them if you are zoomed out I get the idea into my head "the zoom needs to be better to deal with it", instead of "the zoom cant do this". Let the player zoom out and on the highest level switch to a overlay that shows terrain elevation in colors or the like. Dunno, random idea. I can see that the art department might scream in horror at the idea

About stardock paying the game by themselves: That's a nice argument and I hope Ashes will see support for 7 years, though 7 years is quite a long time and based on how stardock is a company that needs to make money as well a certain doubt is hard to get rid of. Too many other games have been shutdown in the past. Yes their business model was different, but ... I mostly blame it on capitalism, which none of us can fix

Great questions and feedback!

Re Supporting our games:

We've been supporting and enhancing our Galactic Civilizations series for 22 years now.  When I say we're supporting Ashes, I don't mean Ashes of the Singularity 1.0. I mean the Ashes series that will evolve over the coming decade.

Re zooming:

The screenshot has me zoomed in way closer than anyone would ever want to zoom in and on a 4K monitor at that (the thumbnail is actually a better representation.

Re Supreme Commander zooming

Like many of you, I played a lot of SupCom.  And I know how it was played. I know how I played it -- almost always zoomed out to icon view.  We absolutely do not want that to be how people play Ashes.  The game design won't encourage it anyway because you will definitely need to make use of the meta unit's special abilities to be effective.  

Total Annihilation is a much closer approximation of how we expect people to play the game except with the Mini map being more sophisticated and players having the ability to zoom really far out if they'd like (but we absolutely don't plan to litter the main map with icons).

TA had no zoom whatsoever and I doubt anyone in the beta will have played TA as many hours as I have.  

Re territory

You will be able to see where one territory ends and another starts. It'll work very similarly to CoH.

Because of these threads I have started playing CoH as I have had it sitting in Steam for some time without playing it. It is the first one so is a bit old but for me it has actually aged very well and looks pretty good with everything turned up. I am quite enjoying it, I also very much enjoyed SupCom and REALLY enjoyed TA...I so hope Ashes turns out well but I am holding in my excitement as much as possible. PA, though an OK game, fell very short of the TA pedigree which it was hyped with and I would hate to see the same here and have my expectations crushed. Here is hoping for a fantastic, smart, beautiful game (I do like to see the battles too) with great net code

And Frogboy's bet is the game is better without it and people will see that. No need to repeat yourself over and over and over again. 

Anyway, if you make for a war-like game where your squads work with some degree of self-sufficiency, and you replace everything with simple symbols and clear overheads, you get closer to something like this:

A great series, but not what people look for in a traditional RTS (which is blowing someone else's shit up after some decent degree of hardships, lest it holds no real value even if it's the prettiest thing in existence).

Coming from a heavily COH-influenced background (though equally dating back to TA, and including obscure things like Enemy Nations), I really do appreciate this (because I really dislike super-zoomed out "not in the game" playstyles).  Even now I'm still playing COH (though not much COH2), and even AOE/ROR and AOK/AOC.  I know there's some zoom in Sins Rebellion (which I still play plenty of), but with reason, and I accept it to be different; my issue is that once the numbers start to stack up it isn't control I'm interested in, just observation.

From the point of realism icons are most certainly a problem, but I'm more interested in something like a fleet position notification (like Sins had), or otherwise letting me know where my command groups are when something big is happening.  If that's as simple as unit highlighting so be it, or if it's something that requires something to be done in-game to unlock, that's fine too -- I guess other games (and the concept of GPS) have broken my notion that groups couldn't be tracked.

I'm not complaining mind you, I much prefer to play zoomed in, I'm just trying to get my head around the totality of what real lore in a game of this scope means (because, as many of us have come to accept over the years, other games don't always tie it in neatly).

I'm hoping to get some UI pics up soon. They're still well in the "programmer art" phase.

The left side of the screen has the empire tree.

The bottom right has the mini-map.

The bottom left begins with whatever is selected and all the abilities it and its children have (there's no "tab tab tab" type convention here, if one of the units in your group has EMP, its present in the UI).

The top has income (metal and radioactives) along with logistics (which controls how many units you can have) and power (which determine show many buildings you can have).

For the Post-Humans, logistics comes from the Logistics Arrays and power comes from capturing power generators on the map.  The reason for this is that we most definitely want to discourage the game from devolving into who can crank out the most units the fastest and who managed to build 20 factories to spam them out.

Gameplay is not about APM, it's a bit more like Sins of a Solar Empire in terms of pacing except that you cannot set abilities to autocast.

We're really chomping at the bit to get the game into your hands so that we can get core feedback before early access.