A lot of the negative reviews involve people who have played less than 20 minutes who then tell people to go play FAF.  

That doesn't, by any means, make your feedback less relevant. I'm just saying that people aren't giving negative reviews because the music and the event sounds are tied to the same options slider.

Here is a dash of hard truth, but hear me out. The premise of the OP that the game feels unfinished is correct, when viewed from a gaming industry standard. So when Ashes is compared to other games, and we all know reviews are not done in a vacuum, the result will be average scores. All Stardock games I've played, and I've only played a few in the last few years, feel this way at release.

It boils down to their development model. If a complete-feeling title from a typical large studio costs $10M from start to release, a game that costs $2M to produce really cannot end up with the same kind of polished results. Stardock's model has some good things and some bad.

Good things:

- You don't have to go through cycles of heavy hiring and lay-offs

- Your games get built by reliable experienced developers who you trust so you can count on a certain quality of work

- Up-front costs are (relatively) low with (fairly) quick return on investment so DLC and expansions can be used to fund further development for years instead of taking many years to recoup the initial development costs.

- You have the staff and funds after release to improve the game based upon player feedback, not just offer minimal support for a static game.

- Players who stick around are rewarded with an ever-improving experience, cultivating loyalty.

Bad things:

- The man-hours dedicated on the game through the development process is (relatively) low, so you have to compromise somewhere to deliver in a timely manner (art, character, gameplay depth, UI)

- Because you have to compromise, the game has an incomplete unpolished feeling compared to $10M titles that damages peoples' first impressions of the game (hence negative reviews)

- These negative reviews and average scores impact early sales and there is a deflating feeling of semi-failure.

Can a game ever fully recover from the initial barrage of average reviews after 1-2 years of continued improvement? This should be a core question asked about the develoment model in general. That is a question only salesmen, marketers, and CEOs can answer, not a casual gamer like myself. Stardock is still alive and kicking so it is obviously working to some degree. But is there a better way? Another question for CEOs.

People like the OP are taking the game at face value, and not considering the development model. They cannot be faulted for that since the Stardock model is pretty unique. Furthermore, players don't spend hours a week contemplating development models, they want to spend that time playing fun games. All this to say that many of the negative reviews for Ashes are fair (not the trolls), as are the average ratings, when the reviewer is an honest person only interested in having fun playing games.

Note: I want to be perfectly clear that, while the game does feel average compared to $10M titles, I think the state of the game at release is fun and pretty good, and in a few limited ways more polished. As such I gave it a positive steam review. I know/hope it will get better, which indicates that I have some faith in the development model. Only time will tell if my faith is well placed. In the interests of full disclosure I still don't think GalCiv3, which follows the same model, has reached that point a year later.

I think Eviator's breakdown is not bad. The worry I have is that GalCiv 3 is a primarily single player experience where Ashes is more of a MP one. That means if the game comes out at a AAA price but is not polished and gets average reviews not so many people will pick it up and the MP will die before it can establish itself. So even if the game is much better a year down the line people won't pick it up because the MP is too small. You could argue that SP skirmish will keep it alive like GalCiv, but GalCiv is I believe a much more complex game with many different ways you could go about playing it. Ashes is too simple to have the same length of SP appeal I think (EDIT: Also Ashes is a new IP so won't have the built-in audience of a game series like GalCiv). The game really should have had replays in at launch, as well as the ability of a player to stick around to watch the game after he has been killed. The Campaign needed a few obvious improvements too. I dunno, I don't mind a smaller consistent MP for myself but I want the game to keep getting supported for years and that relies on sales; I don't know how patient Stardock is. I think they should get the improved campaign out asap with the improved UI and modding stuff and some of those free units/buildings in and get the game out there again at a 25% discount sooner rather than later. I think Stardock are playing the long tail game, where they can make money off a game slowly for many years to come (made much easier with Steam and digital distribution than in the past) but for the immediate health of the game I think getting those improvements sooner rather than later would do much good.

Obviously I like the game as it stands and I've friended people on Steam who like it so I can always get a game when I like. For me the key thing in all this is the long term support. If a Dev came on here and said the game has sold within an acceptable range within their predicted sales range, and going by those numbers they fully intend to support the game with navy, a 3rd faction, T4 units, more tilesets, more units, larger maps with more players, AI personalities, ability to customise the games further (unit/building restrictions), the ability to share resources/generators with allies, great mod support, more powerful UI etc. and that was all locked in at this point then that would be that for me and I would be a very happy chappy. I just don't know if sales will allow all that as I don't know if they hit their targets.

Btw, some "professional" reviewers did a very poor job in their attempts to play and get the most from the game, so that was a bit sad to see. It felt like they went in not wanting to like it.

@Eviator

Is there an RTS released in the last couple of years that you feel is "finished" and was successful? If not Ashes, what recent RTS would you recommend?

Games don't exist in a vacuum. 

Is HW:DOK "finished"? It has 5 skirmish maps and fewer units than Ashes. How about Planetary Annihilation? It didn't include a campaign and only has one faction.  Acts of Aggression? Grey Goo? What is the goal post you're trying to set here?

There is a fine line between expectation management and gamer entitlement.

 Supreme Commander was $59.99 when released in 2007. Forged Alliance was another $19.99 when it was released some months later.  That's a $80 investment in 2007 dollars.And I suspect few, if anyone in this thread actually played SupCom when it came out. The UI that shipped in SupCom doesn't bear any resemblance to what it has today.  Its multiplayer, GPGNet, didn't even function correctly for the first few months for most people.  

I can list any number of criticisms I have for Ashes. But suggesting it's somehow unfinished because say there isn't a separate volume slider for the voice announcer is absurd.  StarCraft II doesn't have such a slider either.  Is StarCraft unfinished?  

The point is, these arguments aren't persuasive other than suggesting that some people in the RTS market are out of touch of where things are today.  At the end of the day,  if you want to play an RTS, what are you going to recommend? Because if your recommendation is some 10 year old game, then we have nothing to talk about.

Exacly Frogboy.

I did play SupCom from beta to last day we knew about Fa, so i know very well and agreed with you Supcom was a totaly bugged game but many know that.

Ashes its bether by far.

yestarday i play FAforever with the usual friends and was the match me and them  realize the FA limited engine, with +/-  3k units on a 8 players game we have to give up and drop from the game and all have i7 and i5 new generations cpus.

Ashes engine its a mark on history games.

Don't worry Eviator.

I realize that many people reading this thread may not understand what my own motivations in this.

Our industry has changed a lot in the last 20 years.  

I'm the last one.  I don't know how many of you even realize that most of the class of 89, so to speak, are gone.  My contemporaries all, well they all "retired" so to speak.  I don't think the average PC gamer even realizes that we're the oldest indie left.

Sid and co sold out to Take 2.  Even Carmack is gone.  They're all gone.  

The model Stardock follows isn't new.  It's the ORIGINAL model of how PC games were made.   You made a game and you iterated on it.  That's how games were made.

I enjoy debating these issues because they're interesting and stimulating.  This is why I'm here.  I don't get paid anymore and haven't for many years.  I'm here for the gamers because I enjoy making games.

How much you pay for a product or service is driven by supply and demand.  The days of getting an RTS with a $20 million budget are long gone.  There have been exactly zero games since SupCom that have gotten that kind of budget.

Supreme Commander's 2 budget was $7 million and that was only because Square required it to be on the console and they would own it (including the trademark).

There will be no Supreme Commander 3. Ever.  

I think Ashes is overpriced at $49.99.  Unfortunately, we live in a highly regulated worldwide market.  We started at $49.99 and various "consumer protection" laws prevented us from lowering the price to $39.99 at release which is where I wanted it. 

Now...

That said: Homeworld: DOK is a $49.99 game.  Do you consider it finished? 

Except, Dark Souls 3 doesn't have an overwhelmingly positive review.  It has about the same review score as Ashes and costs $59.99 for the base game (deluxe edition is $85).

Of course.  But I would never have done so because no NEW RTS has made enough money to justify that kind of investment since......I dunno, Rise of Nations?  An Ashes II would justify that but for new IP? No way.

You can't have it both ways. Room for improvement doesn't mean a game isn't complete.  The OP talks about things like player designed units.  That's a totally different game. 

By any reasonable standard, Ashes is a complete game now. Not just complete but a very good game.

Not to put too fine a point on the obvious but frankly, if RTS players want RTS games made, they should support RTS games.  Ashes is doing very well because we kept its budget down. It lets us keep evolving the game over time.   Do you think SupCom is getting any updates? How about DOK? Grey Goo? PA?

I want Ashes to become THE go-to RTS.  But if it doesn't, and there's no other game that they flocked to instead, the reading of not just me but other game developers will be because there's no market anymore for RTS games of any real size. That's just reality.  It won't be "Oh, if only they had a fourth volume slider for announcer voice! That's why!"

It will be nice 1-2 years from now when Ashes will be in a state typical gamers will find comparable to the best games available and be nearly unanimously reviewed positively so you end up with a 95+% rating. I did my part. Hopefully the current average ratings don't stop that progress. In the mean time I look forward to your iterations.

ASADDF, one may argue that the OP's criticism is an attempt to support the game, not just complain. Or maybe it's to help others make an informed purchase decision, something all consumers should value. In a way, being silent could be worse than offering a negative opinion. I never review games on the basis of how good it promises to be in the future. If it doesn't meet my standard of fun today, it will get a negative review and a promise that I will change my review if the game ever does live up to those standards.

I see only two problems with Ashes.  One is minor, in regards to the current multiplayer based around quick games, and the other a rather significant gaping hole in peoples single player expectations.

The campaign, in it's current form, is short, much too short, and utterly lacking in character due to the simple text interfacing, lack of choices, and any serious climax.  Supreme Commander, since you keep using it for a comparison, had a fully voiced, three branch story, which ended in a pretty massive map.  I'm aware of the road map and have confidence that it will be a much better experience later on, but this is basically 20 points off most of your review scores, and it probably wouldn't have been a budget buster to do it in the first place and be the top seller on steam in return.

The other flaw is a lack of high scale depth.  There's not a lot here to justify playing a larger game.  We only have orbitals for strategic weaponry, bigger, higher resource maps wont make the game more expansive.  They'll basically come down to spamming even more generators to orbital strike the shit out of each other and ramp up the monotonous research system.  I'm not asking for shield bubbles and strategic artillery, but the layers of counters are what made the game great, and those layers were there for release, I blew through the campaign when the game came out, it was awesome, and infuriating, to set up an epic defensive line only to have a spider bot blow away the entire thing and wipe my base because I didn't have anything to counter it.  The all encompassing orbital nullifier just doesn't cut the mustard.  We don't even have a rapid transport mechanism.

There are five games that redefined my gaming experience, one of them was simply a Half-life mod that stomped an entire genre of AAA releases and built the modern FPS.  It blew away everything that came before it and most of what came after.  One is HoMM2, which has a depth of character and style far greater than any of Stardock's TBS games do even if they have far superior AI, I still play it and it's sequel more than any other TBS.  The other three are RTS games.  Warlords: Battlecry, Supreme Commander, and Sins of a Solar Empire.  All three of these games utterly destroyed the standard that came before them.  WBC was a niche game with a small following and an even smaller budget, but to this day it remains unmatched, hardly even approached, in melding role playing and RTS games.  Equally impressive was the massive over-reach in the depth of the faction designs.  The only thing that kept it from making Blizzard a memory was an utter lack of balance, mostly due to the near impossible task of balancing persistent heroes on top of 9 sides as unique as they are in Starcraft, never mind doing it on a shoestring budget.  Supreme Commander is, naturally, the pinnacle of strategic warfare.  The sheer scope of what you could do, if your damned computer could run it, put everything else to shame, it still does.  Then we have Sins, the first successful 4X/RTS hybrid and a damn fine game in every way.

Ashes, in it's current form, will simply redefine engine design.  There's not enough depth for me to lose a week of sleep over it.  I've played each of those games every spare moment, sleeping four or five hours a night, turning myself into a health deprived zombie.  I'm in my thirties now so it's a bit harder to do that(well, easier), but I wouldn't do it anyway.  I'd probably put in a couple hours a week for a while doing multiplayer if I had a better connection, but I'd drop it in a heartbeat to play a game of WBC or Supreme Commander with a buddy, and even Sins, which I burned out on big time dumping thousands of hours into the SOA2 mod, would probably interest me just as much or more.  Red Alert 2 holds more interest.  Snipers, mammoth tanks, kirov's, charging tesla coils for extra oomph.  There's no character, no humor or attachment, just six floating battleships with two upgrade paths and a six second lifespan in the wrong conditions.  I got all wistful playing it and damn near got out my RA2 disc the other day, I'm contemplating it again writing this post.

If you want it to be the go-to RTS, you're going to have to evolve it past it's predecessors first.  The potential is there, but right now it's only potential, far outstripped potential.  It's unpolished, which is expected from companies other than Blizzard, but it's more than just unpolished.  I've probably forgotten more interesting games, which depresses the hell out of me, because I was really hoping you guys would break the mold again and redefine how I saw games.  It really needed to release with huge maps, and enough strategic depth to validate them.  If it had, the campaign would probably be forgiven in 90+ review scores.  If the campaign was a standard setter as well, you'd be in line for game of the year awards and hit the #1 seller spot on Steam.

If all the current RTS games are unfinished by your criteria then I think it is you, and not the game that has the issue.

And shipped with multiplayer essentially broken.

Could this not be said of every RTS?  SupCom has nuke spam.  StarCraft has endless complaints of MMM spam.  People who debate World War II argue the Americans won through Sherman spam. 

That isn't to say that Ashes shouldn't continue to evolve to become a richer strategy experience.  I'm just saying that these particular criticisms mostly argue that this particular game isn't your cup of tea.

And Supreme Commander lost millions of dollars and GPG is gone.  

The days of the $20 million RTS game are long long gone.  Ashes doesn't have the scope of SupCom did because it had 1/7th its budget.  But that doesn't mean it's not finished. It just means that it will take time and money for Ashes to evolve into whatever it is to become over the next several years.

This is the way new PC-only games used to be made and now, with the fall of retail, this is how they are once again being made with the exception of console ports and long-standing franchises.

And that's fine.  But it doesn't mean the game is unfinished. You just don't like it. 

Unfortunately, if we had shipped a game as you describe, we'd be talking about massive layoffs because no PC game can justify the budget you speak of to deliver the ideal game you speak of.

The basic problem in this discussion is that you are assuming we lack the imagination or design capability to deliver this ideal game you want.

Double the Ashes budget and I would have given you 3 distinct races, each with 7 unique air units, transports, naval, 4 tiers, each with 5 to 7 units each with not just more economic depth but with artifacts, harvesting (including wrecks), resource processing (turning 1 resource into another), etc. 

But we can't because the PC market can't deliver the customer base to that genre given the hardware specs a modern RTS requires.  That's the part people ignore.  

Let me give you one example: You want truly ridiculously sized maps? For us, it's a variable we could set.  But even with our very large maps (which are as big in terms of land area as SupCom maps and we have actual 3D terrain) we barely fit in GB of video memory.  Even slightly bigger maps would require an I7 with 4GB of memory to play well unless we totally gimped the terrain for everyone.

There's no scenario where a new RTS IP is going to be the #1 best seller (other than maybe a day or two).  Real-time game engines are hard to make and a modern one, just like SupCom back in the day, has hardware requirements that are pretty far beyond the average PC user.

Hoping to repeat my point once again for clarity, I didn't say "best games available in the RTS genre", I said "best games available". That's right, I'm talking all games. To get an "overwhelmingly positive" rating (and you do want that right?) you can't just be the best RTS, you have to try to be one of the best games ever. Ashes has the bones to be top notch amongst all games, and I fear you are aiming low hoping just to be the best RTS game, which in today's field is like saying you hope to be the best Dodge (zing). If I have $50 to spend on a single game of any genre, I'm going to try to find the one that offers the highest degree of fun. Do you want me to buy Ashes with my $50? Then make it the game in all genres amongst the highest degree of fun. That's a high bar, I know. But if Factorio and Undertale can do it, why not you?

To answer your actual question, I cannot name a single game in the RTS genre that I would want to play more than Ashes right now. If you understand my previous paragraph, you will know that that statement isn't as complimentary as it seems.

Most of the things listed are not unique to AotS though, except for the light source for each object, but that is more of a engine thing than a game play thing. (In other words, it wouldn't make any difference if it was there or not, it is just eye candy with no real purpose except for giving more eye candy to the user.)  I would even argue that the unit formation can be a bad thing, in that the rear units are the weakest, and now, when you are trying to retreat, they end up being fodder (since they are being pushed to the back, waiting for the front line to retreat) while the front line units run for cover.

Not sure why you think a having a 'clear hard counter' is a bonus, it falls into the rock, paper, scissors mentality, (They come at me with a rock, I need paper.  They come at me with paper, I need scissors!), but again, that isn't unique, and pigeon holes people to have the same counters over and over again, and this is usually because of lack of different units types.

For everything else, those have also been in other games, so, nothing truly unique was presented.

I know you think I am being a PITA (or worse), but, honestly, I am trying to nudge the game to be a more complete game, thus generating higher review scores, thus generating more sales.

As was already mentioned, not many review sites will go back and review the same game again, and that is unfortunate for AotS, since it does have lots of potential to leave a definitive mark on the RTS community, but, it just isn't there at this time (see original post).  The saving grace here is, that user reviews can and do change over time, and in the long run, you will have the higher review scores that you were first seeking.

I have no idea if you have played these RTS games or not, and in no particular order, Warzone 2100, Dark Reign 2, World in Conflict, Universe at War, Ground Control 2, Metal Fatigue, Z, Act of War, (not listing Westwood/Relic/Blizzard/Cave dog games), but, these are the ones that come to mind with your list that you made.  These games are not perfect, but, each of them have a piece of the puzzle of the definitive RTS game that we are all looking for.

Funny enough, the only game that is still being developed from that list is Warzone 2100 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/warzone2100/) so, it still shows that people are still playing "old" games trying to get their RTS fix.  Maybe one day AotS will be open sourced as well. 

No one lives and dies by metacritic anymore.  Also, forgive me for being a little snarky but until you actually run a game company, please understand how arm chair game industry advice sounds to someone who's been doing it successfully for 20 years.  Many of the best selling Indie titles don't even have metacritic scores.

Secondly, going to the pain thrust of your post which is "You shoulda", is your advice that we abandon Ashes and move on to a new game?  If not, then what, exactly, are you hoping to accomplish? Some sort of lessons for the future? Because again, there's nothing particularly constructive in your post.  If we knew the campaign would so heavily affect the reviews, we would have done the Deluxe edition of the campaign on the outset.  Sins had no campaign. Demigod had no campaign. GalCiv I had no campaign.  We had no expectation that this would be a huge issue.  So other than having a time machine, there's not a lot we could have done on that.  

We already took the campaign lesson to heart and applied it to Offworld Trading Company which will ship with an extensive campaign.

And: You are moving the goal posts.  None of your arguments indicate that Ashes was unfinished.  

Your main argument seems to be that we should have done what SupCom did which was lose millions of dollars.  SupCom 1 did not sell a million copies at full price or anywhere near it. So they did FA to try to address it and it did ok but not well enough to abandon the entire game design to do SupCom 2.

Will Ashes sell a million copies over time? Who knows.  What I do know is that it will make a profit which will allow us to keep working on it -- despite the implication by you that we should just give up on it (unless you're just trying to be a demoralizing for the sake of being demoralizing). 

If you guys were looking for a way to make me lose interest in talking to you, you were successful.  

(from Eviator)

Just to emphasize this point: I agree with your earlier break down of the pros and cons you listed. 

To answer your specific question here:

The reason is the genre, budget, and price.   First, price is a huge factor.  If you're $20 most people will let it slide.  Have you played Factorio? While I personally like it, if it had been priced at $49.99 it would have gotten murdered in reviews.  Should Ashes have been priced at $19.99? Who can say.  HomeWorld: DOK is $49.99 and has a higher review score than Ashes and Ashes will pass it in sales probably the end of Summer.   

In short, new engines are hard.  New IP is hard.  Putting them together is super hard.  Petrologlyph is releasing a new RTS today (8 bit armies). It's the Nth RTS they've done with that engine and they're pricing it at $14.99.  We'll be watching closely to see how they do.