Founders: Ashes January update

I can't watch it Says that it is private.

Same here, video is private.

Same for me private.  Also for founders are founders threads mixed in with general threads?  Every time I post something to the founders forums and go look at the general ashes forums the same thread is seen there.  I'm not sure if this is just due to me being a founder or if it really isn't hidden.

Edit: Its working now

I LOVE the little laser on the Zeus, it adds character and really helps distinguish the unit visually.  Overall the scaling/texture quality seems to be much improved and I'm really liking what I'm seeing.  The buildings look great, and the distinction between T1/T2/T3 is really nice.

I think the ability for units to gain a real increase in range/vision on high ground will be a very cool feature and will factor prominently in high level play.  

Personally I would like to see a more impassable (with land units) terrain in addition to just hills.  Starcraft is a good example imo of being able to use terrain to your advantage. (Although obviously it doesn't exactly translate 1 to 1 in a game as large as this)  Without much terrain that actually stops movement right through it things like strategic choke points, transports (if they are eventually added), and air units, become a little less meaningful.  This could also allow for units (like "Unit 5") to have cool abilities like being able to scale un-climbable terrain.

I saw that in another thread you mentioned possibly having prebuilt groups of units just being preconstructed armies which you could then decide to deconstruct into their individual pieces (I HIGHLY ENJOY THIS IDEA!)

Although It doesn't seem like factories produce units too fast, I feel that you should need more than 1 of each tier factory to produce a mighty army. You had one of each until 16 minutes into the game which in my opinion seems like quite a long time to wait before building more.  After that point only one additional factory was built. I realize that this isn't required and you can build more factories if you want but I wonder if it would even help all that much when you are still using most of your logistics/rescources for most of the early game while only having one of each factory. In starcraft, in order to build and maintain a properly sized force players need to build at least a few barracks/factories/starports/lairs/stargates/gateways/robos.  This also acted as a good tell for an opponent to scout where you were headed and prepare appropriately.  At the moment if I scouted your base 15 minutes into this game I would have no clue what to prepare for as you have 1 t1, 1 t2, 1 air, and 1 dread factory.   

If units lose their orders when their meta unit gets killed why would I want to even assign my units to an army vs just leaving them ungrouped and using control groups like current RTS games to give orders?  I like the thinking but I'm not sure that it will be a good thing for pushing players towards army usage.

The updated circle/triangle icons are excellent and allow for a much better distinction between cap points for new players.  I would argue that some small FX at each point would be cool as well, something that also changes color with the player who has capped the point, maybe a sort of hologram with their color and the symbol of their race.  

When placing buildings both ingame and in the video, I've noticed that they often appear to be sunk into the ground while placing them.  I assume this is a bug and as it isn't too important is being held off on being fixed until later beta.  Just figured I would mention it just in case.

The announcer voice sounds like it is really muffled or something and this has bugged me for a bit as well but again I assume that this is a polish issue which will be updated at some point in the future?

As units move the Fog of war is kinda hitchy at times, is it possible to update the refresh speed for the fog a bit?  Think Supcom Vanilla  (fog of war updates are pretty slow) VS FA (smooth as can be fog of war updates)  It could also be that it is a very rough fog of war shape vs a smooth line at the edge.

Not sure if the air scale changed much but it looks very nice.

Possibly a byproduct of scaling, but it seems that when armies move together, the smaller units are a little too far apart in the formation.  

https://youtu.be/F83FWzAJJOc?t=1415  At this moment in the video, I noticed that a T2/maybe T3 defensive structure with a longer range (around T2 arty in supcom, maybe a little shorter) would be nice to have.  I know you don't want to encourage excessive turtleing however I feel that this is a hole in the current defensive lineup as I would expect some sort of static defense around that area to be able to hit your units.

A few things still seem a bit off to my eyes but I think that has more to do with this being a smaller scale map vs a gigantic one.  You can only make mountains so big on a smaller map.  I think some of it is I see the smaller hills as looking like mountains due to the way they are constructed but I believe they are just supposed to represent hills in the map.  

Overall, KUDOS I know you are working with a limited budget and that alot of this was done with the majority of the team on vacation.  The pace at which you have implemented changes in the recent weeks is really quite astonishing with the limited resources.  

As always, keep up the good work Brad and I can't wait to try out the changes myself.

Sarg

PS. Fellow founders DO NOT SHARE THIS VIDEO, I want more like it

PPS.  Sorry for the walls of text recently, I've had some extra time and I've been thinking about/look at AOTS nonstop and want to try and help as much as I can.  Noone IRL likes RTS games anymore so I just write and write and write haha.

Thank you so much for posting this. I found it so satisfying I watched it twice! There is a lot new in the video that demonstrates you've been giving serious consideration to feedback given on these forums, and I greatly appreciate that. I'll leave the feedback on visuals to others, as I don't pay too much attention to that stuff. Having tweaked the unit scale, I'm curious what folks think about the current spacing of units that are in formation.

- Initial logistics costs 50 quanta. YES!!! One of the best things you've done ever! This allows you the potential to buy something(s) with quanta before hitting the first, second, and third logistics caps. At one point you mentioned some folks saying logistics is the only thing they ever spend their quanta on. In my experience with 0.71 and prior logistics must always be the first 2 or 3 things you have to spend quanta on. After that you have enough quantum relays to start other things. With the 50 quanta start cost for logistics you just opened up so much early quanta for other tactics. Also thanks for the convenient logistics button. I recommend you make the whole logistics box a button so you don't have to spend extra time getting precisely on the tiny + button.

- The build you did in the first minute or two of the game is exactly the optimal build I found on my own. This tells me not that I'm a good player, it tells me that the game mechanics are intuitive enough that multiple people can happen upon the best tactics independently with some experimentation.

- You mentioned build times. I personally think build time for many of the buildings, factories included, are fine. The three buildings that stand out to me right now are the Smarty, Repair Bay, and Drone Bay (I have not played much with the other defensive buildings to have formed an opinion on them). I believe those three buildings need a build time and cost reduction of 25 to 40%. There is a caveat. I noticed multiple engineers could build structures. I didn't know that was possible and I swear I tested it in prior versions, but it does work in 0.71. Right clicking the engineer, as you mentioned in the video would definitely be an improvement to the assist system. By allowing multiple engineers to assist building structures, without severe diminishing returns, my thoughts on the Repair Bay and Drone Bay could change (Smarty still needs to be fast and fairly cheap to build with one engineer).

- Speaking of diminishing returns, you mentioned decreasing them a little. I think this would be a good idea. I'm not so dogmatic that I think they need to be eliminated, but I would like to have the ability to wreck my economy temporarily to get out some fast structures and units in a pinch. Right now if diminishing returns is 50% output reduction for the next extra engineer, it should be more like 25% output reduction.

- I like the look of the new resource and control group symbols on the minimap. I'm hoping you guys still have some ambitious plans for the representation of units in the Strategic Map, as blob shades blend in and little dots are not cool and barely useful. A heat map and/or some other abstraction of army strength is appropriate.

- I am looking forward to playing around with air unit harassment. I expect it will lead to some feedback about balance and air unit movement. It will definitely add more variety to gameplay tactics and strategy, so YAY!

- So glad you mentioned armies losing their orders when the lead unit dies. I wasn't sure that was mentioned on the forums, and I was in the process of making a video demonstrating it, but now that you've confirmed it I don't need to. I will keep it in the back of my mind in case it's not addressed as we get closer to release

- At 7 minutes it looked like you had an engineer initially move toward a westerly relay that you had already captured. And it actually started moving!!! If that is indeed what happened, and other units will do the same, THANK YOU! It is a big pet peeve of mine that you have to click AROUND relays you already owned to get units to move there.

I've got other things to do now so I'll end here. But I think I may revisit the video yet again to see if I can glean anything else and provide additional feedback. What I see looks real good.

This exemplifies the difficulties in game design. A huge number of vocal forum users thought the maps were too choke-pointy, and wanted more open maps. You want the opposite. I guess that means the devs need to have a wide variety, and I think they have done that pretty well.

I think you misunderstood him (unless I have misunderstood instead :)), he says that that is the current implementation but they will change it. It sounded like it was an intended feature originally but didn't play out like they had imagined in reality.

As regard to unit spacing in an army, a little bit of choice might be nice if possible. If you are going to assault a position with a lot of AOE point defence then the large spacing might be nice (similar thing exists in the Total War games), at other times narrower might be a plus.

You may have forgotten Brad but the Quanta requirements are much higher for logistics in the build we have. In the build your playing in this video the logistics upgrade requirements are already much cheaper - this is great as it allows the player more choice of how to spend their quanta earlier on.

Smarties OK in build length I think, could be a touch shorter but might be just right now. No fun if they are spammed everywhere. As you discovered in the video the build times for drone and repair bays are too long.

Terrain textures looking great, really solid. Though there was a little pop-in at times, with what looked like a snow/white dotted layer.

Air is looking loads better, going to really add to the game.

3 levels of scaling on the units is really clear now, though for me it is a slight shame to have T1 so small, as you will rarely see the detail on them now, though I understand the decision. Additions to Zeus and Nemesis really good. And I agree the scout does look very similar at a distance to the Archer.

All in all loads of solid progress. Looking forward to patches and Beta.

Thanks for the feedback buys.

A few notes:

Re factories

I agree regarding factories.  Right now, it's very map dependent. On a tiny map, a few factories is enough. ON a large map, you might have a dozen.

Re Meta unit leadres

We are redoing this such that someone else will take over and continue carrying out the orders.

Re announcer voice

This might just be a volume issue

Re quanta and logistics

I actually thought that the 50 quanta cost for logistics was in 0.71. I did it back in November and I guess it didn't make the cut off date.  So that's why I didn't understand what the big deal was.

Re Engineer asssit

I strongly support more engineering assit than we have presently.

Re build times on defenses

Yea, those are way too long.

I will be posting a Substrate preview shortly.

Great video update, love to see more of those for us Founders!  It's a great dynamic way to see things updated.

LOL true, but only as long as it doesn't get in the way of actual development

Looking great

And yes more engineers! who doesnt like tons of workers in their base!, it can make sniping build power more usefull thant it is at the moment.