Ashes of the Singularity

you asked the right guy. 

I've followed all two of these projects since their baby steps. Planetary Annihilation in particular. I backed it on Kickstarter at the 20$ tier which at the time took my account to zero. It was a big deal for me to make that choice.

after that I started having more money and I invested even further upgrading my backing to full alpha access.

I've been really active on PA's forum. becoming their 3rd most active forum member (devs and moderators included): 

As for Grey Goo and Act of Aggression, I followed Grey Goo intently. I played the alpha and stopped after that. I have not played Act of Aggression even though I was aware of it and have been keeping a close eye on it since it's announcement so I will abstain from commentary. 

Game #1: Planetary Annihilation

    1. DID RIGHT : 

That I get to say today that I swung PA towards full strategic zoom with the good help and initiative of Culverin is something of a great pride for me. (/side : not trying to sound menacing there  ). not only that but I instigated the renovation of their forum software. I spotlighted some very underrated mods up from the mess of cobwebs they were disappearing under into such center stage that the devs took them and implemented them as stock. I helped list and report countless bugs. and got the satisfaction of helping countless people with technical issues.

Some banners the devs took up towards the end. "Singleplayer is best and more numerous. we make this game for singleplayers not for multiplayers" and the actions this stance justified (such as refusing the community Global chat despite that the community was pleading for it en-masse and in crushing majority).

Bad balancing. One faction and yet the balance is still off to this day. There are units that are note-worthily more worth you investing in than others. it always switches around which unit this is according to the latest balance tweak but mostly I pin the difficulties with balancing on several things :

A : arguably going for a faster-paced gameplay than Starcraft through handicapped UI and one-shot kills all across the board. 

B : Everything has nearly as much DPS as HP if not more. 

C : And I did say one-shot kills not one-hit kills. Simulated projectiles is notably unused in this game. Even with a firering ark for mobile artillery units that leaps over orbital units the shots still hit.

D : the devs have trouble realizing how good some deals they create can be. You say you have to build five T2 40000-metal costing huge structures called catalysts on metal planets to have control over the death ray with no cool-down or rebuilt necessary... well that's something better players can rush. Very easily. and end a setup that looked like a 2-hour long match in 8 minutes and they GET the death weapon AT the 8 minute mark. Consistently. it means the game-ender is no fun to watch because it signals the end of the game; it isn't part of it. 

Same for asteroids that now destroy the entire planet no matter the size. and that costs the same price only you only have to build ONE of them. 

Same for the Gaz Giants which provide you with near-endless space in which to build as many mass extractors as you wish unconstrained to spots. and those extractors don't produce less metal than the t1 and t2 they produce more (5 times as much and 1.8 times as much) and they produce energy.

SAME for mass points period. They pay for themselves faster than TA's and SupCom's. WAY faster. and they don't just slightly increase output per tier THEY TRIPLE. Add that to the fact mass points are in overabundance on a default planet there is nearly NO POINT fighting over terrain. 

This has forced both the Devs (for their ladder and default skirmish maps) and the community (in their custom-made maps for skirmishes) to abstain from using any of those three types of planets. SEVERELY limiting the variety of gameplay.

Via both the incredibly low survivability of your army AND the incredible efficiency of static defenses (only against large slow land armies not commander sniping payloads which is the opposite of what is good for gameplay value) you are encouraged to bunker in until the exps and game enders you're ecoing for do their thing.

there are techs but they are too close together. you can unlock t2 near instantly. tech 1.5 is available right from the start. the higher tech definitely feels mushy compares to what it could be (again the one-shot phenomena is at work here) a t2 only overwhelms 2-4 t1 units but beyond that it's the opposite. t2 Ranges aren't anything to write home about and in the end there are only two techs.

GALACTIC WAR : their sad pathetic excuse for singleplayer and campaign. <- I'm sorry If you find this disgraceful but there's really no other way to put it. this was and is a sad sad shame for all those of us who love and cherish PA. there's nothing to salvage from it. Even the AI doesn't work with it. it's... I just rather not talk about it. I've expressed what I have to say about it here : http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/471850 and it makes it all worse that their stance is "we want to support singleplayers not multiplayers" is utterly in diametric opposition with their situation. 

It seems just logic and reason to me to align your stance with the cards you have in hand.

Economy is just plain out the wazoo. it's pointless to hope to have something decent looking going on in your economy bars. better get used to it flickering up and down. That's the energy bar i'm talking about. Mass is just something you'll be wasting the entire length of the game on a massive scale. the mass bar is pretty pointless in this game come to think of it.

Bad UI (some of it plain unjustifiable. the devs said "because we're not making SupCom3"):

no visible build queue. uneditable build previews. all the menus going from the main menu in the game waste screen real estate and end up not being able to adequately present the setups which can easily happen (requires lots TONS of the scroll bar use).

no dual screen (or more. as was promised). no Sli/Crossfire support. Linux port is largely underwhelming. (then again there was always and still is only a single dev tasked with doing the linux port).

Giving credit where it's due for mods they took into the base game. Actually moral and technical support for modders period. nowhere inside PA anywhere is there any mention that PA is moddable or has mods. PA does not have a mod hub on steam. PA may possess an intentionally easy to-mod architecture (for a very specific safe zone. requests for API calls and hooks from modders have been ignored for three years now) but the modding community feeds itself. the mod platform was made by the modders, the mod forum can not be linked to without being redacted. it is claimed in some articles about PA that "Mod tools are built right into Planetary Annihilation as first-class citizens. You don't have to install any weird programs on your computer or visit sketchy websites; it's all available within the game." The epitome of lies and not very classy according to the public.

The pathfinding. The pathfiding is godawful in this game. they are using flowfield. but I've lost any conviction that flowfield is meant for anything other than providing CPU overhead. it really doesn't make units path better. side by side comparison with FA : PA pales in pathfinding.

Lack or realism and immersion :

A lot of it has to do with not trying to push the scale further than what FA did as people expected and instead toning it down. I started what is now the biggest thread on their forum the "scale megathread" google is your friend, and obtained nothing on that front despite total support and continued pressure from the community and even a mod/tool by cola colin which did 90% of the work that would be involved to accomplish this.

Intel :  they messed intel up real hard. On a spherical map you get less information by default then on a flat one because at the horizons the information is hard to read and beyond that it's hidden. you see somewhere around a third of the planet's surface with one camera angle. and that's not it. there are several planets. and you only view icons on one of them at a time. So with no minimap for all this (excluding Cola_colin's recent excellent mod, how did they deduce this situation was ripe for scaling down the intel you get from it's spiritual predecessors ?? 

No pinned icons for scouted structures. no type on radar blips. ridiculously small radar ranges. They upright deleted orbital radar and made all orbitals be visible by default. They created an orbital radar with a whole planet's worth of vision. Vision. 

The intel in this game does not exist. It's just an aside.

the "feel" of the game is off both in terms of what you see (units poping if you so much as sneeze at them. and this includes the commander, supposed to be a lumbering terrifying giant who in the end has no prestance whatsoever, units as big as mountains mountains as high as the horizon.... basically you're playing on King Kai's planet and it's supposed to feel "epic") and in terms of the gameplay (the strategy is nowhere even near PA. PA is a strictly tactical game. you apply a BO. just like Starcraft. no thinking involved.).

So in the end you could say just balance.

Game #2: Grey Go

    1. DID RIGHT :

Game #42: Etherium (participated in both the alpha and beta. Some of my closest friends and also my clan were hyped for it.)

    1. DID RIGHT :

Dawn of war had sync kills. It made the battles cinematic. Seeing units get killed with the same animations is boring.

Also, original cool factions are a plus. Space furries, space Egyptians, space america is so damn boring. Oh and also, don't let it be a battle of who can click the most per minute. Grand strategy should be far more important than micro and dancing.

Half the fun is letting a players imagination take over. My fondest memory was when me and my brother, as space marine and eldar, were getting ready to wipe out the last ork Ai. To our surprise we found him massing a huge number of weak ground units, slugga boys, and our small band of space marines and eldar fought back a huge tide of orks. Sync kills and dead bodies were everywhere! I even had to orbital bombard the swarm. Amazing experience. It went downhill in the expansion when they started catering to MLG so much so that they removed sync kills. The heart of dawn of wars gritty feel. Absolutely disgusting and disappointing end for that game that still died out. Except now it has no replay value for the core fans like me that they sacrificed for the MLG extremists, who moved on ANYWAYS.

Planetary annihilation:

Ive played the game a lot (+300 hours) since Alpha til today. I think Uber have made a fantastic game (with their resources). I think it is important to remember that it is not an AAA-title, but a small game developing company. 

Good things:

Fantastic idea behind the game, fighting on multiple planets with a lot of units with the possibility to zoom in on one unit and out to the entire sun system. Very fun p2p. A lot of fantastic sceneries forexample when you were bussy in a fight on one planet, and suddenly you see a lot of explosions far far away in the background, on another planet. And then you realize it probably is your main base on that other planet that is under attack!

The bad: 

The "many planets" and "3d" maps (planets) seemed very interesting as an idea but they didnt manage to get it to work too well game play wise. It was to hectic to play on more then two planets (for one player). Also the orbital thing was fantastic in so many ways, but they didnt quite make it work 100% game play wise. The game handling came in the way for the game play. 

On the other side, playing in one planet was a litle dull. The planets were too flat and had no strategic points. I realized my dream through the game developing was to get Supreme commander gameplay, in the Planetary annihilation setting. Maybe a hopeless dream though. 

I am very optimistic with Ashes of the Singularity. Keep up the good work and get the game play right!  

Snierke

PA: Bought this game in unplayable alpha, don't regret it.

Good:

Awesome originality and new ideas in an RTS, with the concept of planets and using planets as weapons. Titans + other new units added a little more.

Bad:

Not much difference in functionality of different(Bots/vehicle) units and only one faction. No research. No unit customization. No unit ranking.

Grey Goo:

Good:

Only played a couple of missions, maybe 6 or 7. Interesting base building mechanics. 3 very different factions. A tiny bit of base and unit customization. 

Bad: 

Very few unit choices, very RPS, maps too small, zoom too close. Very little research. I think the units didn't rank up as well. All in all, meh...didn't even bother with skirmish. Definitely no RA1 or 2 lol.

Act of Aggression: I really like Eugen systems, so even though my (Wargame like) expectations were a little let down, I don't regret buying the game.

Good:

A lot of different units and structures, good economic structure(not perfect). 3 different factions. A lot of research and upgrades. Range and Vision matters.Less RPS. Combined forces and maneuvering extremely important. Maps are the biggest for this type of RTS. Base building is fun and can become STRONG. This is by far the best RTS of this kind, since C&C Generals/Zero hour.

Bad: ZOOM TOO LOW. Range and vision is difficult to apply and maintain. It can be hard to maneuver your forces, due to spacial cramping.(It seems that all of these types of RTS's have this problem.) You have to blob(you need a lot of units and maneuvering isn't always possible or practical). Maps are still too small. No customization. No Ranking/vetrancy.

2 games that I think are extremely relevant to AOTS are: World in Conflict(Wic) and Wargame. Both of these games use a world/environment similar to the size and scale of AOTS (especially Wargame). Wic has global abilities called tactical aids, that you might want to check out, if your not already familiar with them. And both games were exemplary in: Vision, Intel, Concealment, Unit placement, Line of sight vs Line of fire, Maneuver warfare, Ambushing, Capability and diversity of units, and Awesome, full map zoom.

I will always go for bigger maps and higher zoom over flashy and detailed graphics. 

[Moderator edit]

We saw your other post. This topic is regarding what people liked and didn't like in other RTS's. thx! -mods

I did buy all 3 aforementioned games and while i did not play them enough to be completely fair judge of them, i still think me spending money on them gives me right to voice my opinion, even if some people may disagree with my views... i guess i mostly want to vent my frustration, cause there is a good reason, why i did not play them that much, as all of them pretty much suck, for various reasons. 

anyway, good thread.

Planetary Annihilation: the only good thing about it i guess is the innovative approach and technological advancement... but other than those, i dont like so many things about it...

- single faction

- the unit gameplay, you just produce them en masse and there seems to be very little finesse to using all of them. they are just expendable and you could not care less about them. Together with the cartoony graphics it takes all the immersion away. So i build naval battleship, happy about having a behemoth unit, only to find out it both looks and acts like shit. I lose it pretty quickly, but so what i build zillion of them. 

- you spend hour to play the game and produce massive armies, spread around the whole globe, only to game move to that solar system phase and all that shit wont matter, cause another celestial object on its way for deep impact. Gives you solid feeling of wasted time, if that happens, does it not?

- the gameplay on the spherical map turned out pretty annoying, at least for me. During my limited experience i played only on relatively smallish planets i guess, where i would constantly lose focus of my stuff, cause scrolling down a bit would move it behind horizon. Once again it was nice and innovative idea (sort of, there were other games like Populous doing this before), but for me personally, did not work.

At least i bought this on sale, unlike Grey Goo.

Grey Goo: i could see there was obvious effort put into campaign and the aesthetics, those would be the positives. But the gameplay itself, i guess i should be warned when i read about the "oldschool" approach. But then again i used to like CnC games, like Red Alert 3 not so long ago. Anyway, the main negatives:

- the faction design - those have to be the most bland factions i ever witnessed in post 2000 RTS game. Literally nothing interesting to play with, except maybe epic units. Other than that, bunch of walkers or hovercrafts, obligatory anti-air, arty, some airplanes, which felt totally underwhelming... and that was it. Constructing human bases was annoying, rather than fun. Clearly there was some intent to make Goo faction unique, but it was not enough, yeah, you did not build traditional bases, which was interesting twist, but the unit roster was just meh. I think this faction, the way it morphed the mother goo into different unit types, could have been influenced by the Alien faction from the oldish Earth 2160 game - they worked in similar manner, except important part, beside the cloned/morphed land units you had access to massive spaceships, which were incredibly awesome and fun to use! Maybe OP as hell, but thats beside the point, which is:

no navy, no superweapons, no "general" abilities, no commando units, no alternate income sources (AFAIK), no "T3" level units, no sins like complex research tree, useless aircraft, etc., etc...

not saying all those things have to be in every game to be succesful or good, but just seeing that list it makes you feel that the game was truly pretty basic.

- the UI - i guess it was rather OK to use, but why did it have to took half the screen i would not know

- even with the effort put into single-player campaign, gameplay-wise it catered to multiplayer crowd with low unit counts and short match times... for me personally, thats not enough. 

Act of Aggression: the best thing about it is the modern-warfare setting. Since for whatever reason all the other recent RTS tend to be sci-fi based (Ashes of Singularity, Grey Goo, Planetary Annihilation...) I like the use of real world stuff as well, the canned CnC was presented to be as modern warfare RTS too, except when it came to units, instead of Apaches you would get stupid scifish custom design VTOL helicopters. Not surprised a bit, it was cancelled But:

- the faction design again - while better than in case of GG, i feel the factions are not diverse enough. Or the game does it best to obscure those differences to players. When i played CnC Generals, the differences between US, China and GLA were very obvious on many levels and in many aspects, you could easily describe those differences in bunch of sentences, just playing few games. I played all the factions in AoA and i have an issue to do something similar here. All the factions have infantry, tanks, artilleries, planes, harvest the same resources...i am aware of some differences between say US arty (being missile based) and Cartel one (being tube artillery). or that one faction tends to need more money, while other aluminium...but somehow thats not enough, since despite these i fail to feel somehow different, if i play US as opposed to playing Chimera.

- lack of navy, which really could have been there and the plane mechanic is shit. I like direct control over my stuff - CnC approach, especially Generals one was so much satisfying to use. The only thing i like i guess is that you can have technically as many bombers as those "airfields", not just single general power one like in Gens. Its truly awesome to watch 15 B2s flying toward enemy base and in a while to send them again...

- the obscurity of visual stuff and the game related info cause of shitty UI - i never thought i would consider more realistic graphics as opposed to cartoony ones to be a downside, but in case of this game, it is. I cant literally see shit at times. Because someone thought it would be awesome to have everything up to scale, everything was zoomed in at first, so you could barely see 1/5 of your base. Then, after the fan uproar, they moved the camera back, so now you can see maybe half of your base at once - except you cant see visually identify your units or see them at all (like infantry). And if i have trouble to distinct different types of units in my unit blob, i start to lose the will to actually use them in some meaningful manner, rather than selecting all of them and send toward enemy. Why would i even want to buy artillery, if during battle i cant even see which one it is, so i wont select and use it separately the way its meant to be used for it to be most useful...the last time i played, i would just build shitload of helicopters for US and played just with those, cause i actually felt in control over what am i doing.

In regard to UI, you have quite a lot of structures, units and upgrades at your disposal, the issue is, actually too much, because the game presents them in totally chaotic way. Instead of having all those upgrades (and there is quite lot of them) displayed in some separate screen and most importantly in ONE place - like Sins research screen, they are accessed separately from several buildings, except you never know which building it was, unless you played the game enough... i still have no idea how to capture POWs for example...

- i found that despite the vast amount of stuff to build and upgrade, i rarely have enough resources to do it all. Even if i have multiple refineries over half of the map, i find myself constantly in need of something if i want this or that. Maybe its meant to press you into choices, to follow the path you think its best, so you cant have it all - but ultimately i ignored the research almost completely altogether and would rather build units for the available money.

So that would be all. Maybe i am just growing old, but as i see it the game needs to hit the sweetspot for me between being not too shallow like GG nor overwhelming like AoA. Otherwise i lose interest very fast. Bottom line, Rebellion is 10x superior game to all these 3 combined, cause it has flawless UI, ideal pacing, interesting diverse and fun to play factions, more complex and potentially fun features like trade, culture, diplomacy or proper research, different victory conditions...and while its big scale game and allows you to have fairly big armies (even though not as much as PA, way more than GG) and some frigates and cruisers are sort of expendable, there are actually units, the most fun to use ones, that you care about and attend to them like capships, titans or starbases, cause of the experience mechanic and abilities... 

I am considering buying Ashes of Singularity this year and later Cossacks 3, when it comes out. Please, dont dissapoint me. I really miss a game which would excite me to play the way Rebellion did.