If you want to see the stats and details on units there are a handful of files that will have everything you need:
In the assets\gamecore directory you wlll find:
UnitTemplates.csv
BuildingTemplates.csv
WeaponModuleTemplates.csv
These are the two main files you can open up in Excel and look at things like cost, weapon damage, rate of fire, etc.
We will be listening to suggestions on balance.
Thank you Frogboy.
After more than 12 hours of play time with Escalation. i want to talk about some bugs that are old and some maybe new.
I think and hope this will be the best place to talk about it.
i have i few more to add but i will keep testing AOTS Escalation.
after 10 hours of playing i did notice some Defensive structures have the upgrade option, the truth is that i did not see the difference after upgrading. i am going to keep looking into that, but it does look very interesting.
I was kindly given access to the Beta recently so here is my feedback after around 9 hours of game play. As it seems an older build a bunch of it may be irrelevant but here you go:
Game options and UI
- Skirmish Map options should show what they mean/configure when you mouse over them. Currently you have to open up the options first and mouse over those to work it out.
- The defence building, The Barrager, says it has a long range but can’t hit things close to it. Would be nice to have two range rings, maximum and minimum range, currently only have latter.
- Would be very useful if you could tell how many metal/rad spots there are on a node when zoomed out in strategic view.
- The new UI is very monotone, in some instances too much so. Please put some red, yellow and blue back onto the Construction, Quanta Upgrades and Orbital abilities buttons, even if the colours are quite muted that is fine. The colour difference makes it much faster and easier to click on the right one than trying to remember the actual imagine itself. You have also made these buttons too small I would say as they are used a lot.
- Game Summary screen could be improved but allowing the clicking of the column heading to rank that column highest to lowest or vice versa. (how map selection is treated)
- You have moved the current logistics number and + button all the way to the top left of the screen but you have the current amount of quanta on the right hand side. So when you want to decide whether you will upgrade logistics now or later, or how much more quanta you need to gather before upgrading logistics you have to keep looking between the right and left of the screen. It is a nuisance and they should not be split up. They work together very well currently in the base Ashes game.
- Is the top left box actually necessary? Or are you planning to use the space in it for more things later?
- We really need an “Enemy Destroyed” type message when you take out an HQ for all players. A) it is more satisfying and 
We know when someone has been destroyed rather than just quiting or crashing out. In larger MP games you often don’t know.
- A message when node lost would be most useful too! Especially as maps are so large now it is much easier to lose track of things. Could be voice or could be a sound and text displayed on screen. The latter might be wise as I’ve seen too many youtube videos where players get fed up of being told they don’t have enough of a resource type or logistics, so you might not want to add to that.
- Economy bars might benefit from being a different colour to that of the UI. You could take things in better at a glance then.
- The version I have does not have the zoom out phase/stage shown in the recent screen shots where you have a normal map view but the units and buildings are overlaid with icons. Perhaps it is different in use but I can’t say I am a big fan of those icons, I hope they are toggle-able. But if it allows us to zoom out further before switching to the green view then that would be welcome.
Graphics and look
- Terrain has radar like dots on it if it is out of your range of sight, even if you have been there. Is particularly noticeable on lava pools and doesn’t look good.
- The Starburst defence building need some work in a few ways. On the building description it says it hits units in a radius around it but if you look at the weapon description it only hits small aircraft (this includes drones). The effect itself seems well overcooked, a big pink messy beam.
- The PHC Gunship’s blue light/beam would be a lot cooler with a deep sounding mini gun type weapon, fits the PHC much better too. The unit itself could have looked more aggressive, but oh well.
- Crystal Map. This is a tough one. In some way visually very interesting but it is also a very busy terrain so I find it much harder to make out units comfortably. Especially if you are a purple or other dark colour I find myself on these maps and to a lesser extent on the lava maps putting the brightness of my monitor up a fair bit. (Though I should state here i tend to have monitor brightness on the low side and that has been fine for the original 3 biomes)
- I find the new resource lines sometimes impossible to see at certain zoom levels. Zoomed right in you can make them out but zoom out a bit and on some maps they becomes essentially invisible. Some people might like this but it is too invisible for me. It might be a bug connected to the flickering. Seems best on the desert maps
- I am not sure taht on the crystal tile maps the elevation is clear enough in some instances. If it is the paler tiling then that is fine but sometimes it is a darker tiling that doesn't work as well. (on some slopes on the 3 player crystal map)
- The Oblivion turret, the upgrade to the Artillary Post, has the same projectile graphics. I think it is important they are different so you know what you are getting hit by. Also for the beauty of variety of course.
- New Substrate unit that buffs shields -will that have a graphic of some sort? At the moment it feels a bit odd as it is a big unit but doesn’t visually do anything. I would suggest a very subtle effect if you don't want to go with beams like the Capacitor, otherwise you overwhelm things.
- Substrate defence building the Disrupter Cannon currently re-uses the PHC’s HQ weapon, but a lot more of them, to shoot things. Please change this as it is a really big effect, but its too big, messy and not that good looking/satisfying. The original splay of yellow lines it fired in the Twitch stream a month or so back was much better.
- The new Brute is fine/good. Seeing the concept work I thought it was a little too Substrate-ish but the way its colours have been done when you see it mixed in with Archers it seems to fit in fine.
- Have you thought of slightly modernising the look of the green/red/blue move lines? They are fine/ utilitarian but if you have time could be spruced up a touch perhaps, even just a tiny glow to them.
- The orbital ability that adds nano armour looks like it kind of misses. It should hit directly on top of the unit. Ideally it would then spread over the top of said unit before melting into it…or something along those lines 
Bugs
- I did think one of the substrate defence buildings was not shooting at its maximum range but later it did. I think more the problem is that if an enemy is approaching the turret does not always turn and fire when they should/can. Noticed this with the Substrate Pulveriser particularly.
- On the lava map Logaun in the top left you can’t put the 2 radioactive extractors down, they are too close to things. Quite the handicap.
- On the Crystal maps the resource lines flicker as you zoom in and out
- The red beam shot by the Substrate Reaper unit looks worse than it does currently in Ashes. I assume it is a bug.
- On map Elysium, at around the 12 o’clock position one of the nodes rests inside crater like terrain. In my game the enemy AI built a bunch of stuff around it. But it was kind of inaccessible on the bumpy terrain and my AI ally couldn’t hit it with his Sub units. I couldn’t hit some of the stuff in there either so would have had to resort to bombers. Is this by design? I don’t think the AI can cope with it.
- Pausing the game makes all the selection circles look patchy and broken up.
- In this last game as Sub getting a lot of units not responding. Not sure if linked to fair bit of pausing and alt-tabing.
- First time hitting shift after coming back in to the game after alt tabbing still brings up steam overlay
- Units dying while selected still takes away the orbital or upgrade screen. This old bug is the one which really drives me nuts.
- When zoomed in on some Substrate units with the camera stationary you can see they move between high and low rez textures. Particularly on the Destructor.
- Lots of flickering on the hover pads of Substrate units.
- Knock the AI back to just their HQ but with still one node and a few buildings and engineers, and then pull back you can see the AI has given up and is not doing anything. If you kill the engineers they rebuild them then they just sit there.
Gameplay
- When you draw a box around your army units the Sapper unit is also chosen, that then cancels what it is building as it is accidentally sent somewhere. It should be made exempt from selection if there are army units there like the engineer is. The Substrate Avatar also should be. Always selecting that with the army when I don’t want to and have to re-queue everything or come back to an area I think should have been developed but I had accidentally taken the Avatar away minutes ago.
- The PHC flying node capturing air unit takes forever to take a node as it is out of range of capturing as it swoops all over the place. It makes it almost un-useable as it would take it into neutral AA fire (which kills early scouting) or enemy player fire. Usage scenarios too narrow based on how it currently moves. I guess you could build a bunch of them. Tried that once but they never made it, darn neutral AA again.
- Orbital Jam actually blocks an impending attack, like a nuke which has already started a count down. I had (perhahps foolishly) thought it was a pre-emptive block, like if you were going to charge a position. It is very cheap for how powerful it is and blocks something far more expensive. Not yet taken note of the rate it scales in expense. The problem you are going to have is that people will hear the nuke count down and then they will be scrambling around the map to see where it is going in a race against time if they are the target. I can see some not liking this aspect. On a side not PLEASE consider making the nuke hurt/kill everything in its radius, i.e. kill the players units if they are also in the circle. This would stop people just dropping it on their own armies or bases when the enemy is in close, which is a bit of an abuse. That would have been my first call in easing the use of the nukes before making it get very expensive very fast and adding the orbital jammer ability and adding the mobile jammer unit, which may kill the nukes use a bit too much. Will have to see how it pans out. If you were to make so the nuke hurt everything in its circle you could reduce the size of the circle to make it more useable. No bad thing to be honest as at the moment one nuke can sometimes wipe out a whole base on some maps and there is no coming back, which is a bit harsh.
- Nearly all the Substrate defence buildings are unlocked almost straight away. I would think locking some behind other buildings might add more to the sense of progression.
Misc (some I would call bugs):
- I assume Sub shield unit is place holder graphics...though just seen today's new pics and it still looks mostly made up of dots…please don’t have the shield be made up of dots…I won’t say more on this till we see the finished article but...yeah
- Camera still goes up and down with the terrain as you pan across a map, even when zoomed out in Strategic view mode.
- An old one but it would be nice to see it addressed. The Chronos Blossom fire upgrade ability, where it shoots pale rockets around it in a very nice display is only visible when you are zoomed quite close in and cuts out very quickly once you start to zoom out. I think it is a hangover from ages ago when many other projectiles did not show when at maximum zoom but do now
- I also noticed the Martyr’s fire did not show up when at max normal zoom. I realise this may be LOD type considerations but I really hope not. You can miss out on the scale of the battle if you can’t see it all going on and your judgement on how to respond will be based off inaccurate information. And zooming out and still seeing all the fire fights is cool too J
- Was surprised there were no new orbital buildings to put some of the new orbitals behind. I thought there was room for at least one more.
- The loud hum when you get close to units is still crazy loud.
- Air power is a real viable option now, in that 1v1 human match I was caught unawares and it can really hurt you more than before.
- I couldn’t get the teleporting to work. Maybe I am doing it wrong as it was worded slightly oddly/unclearly. It seems to be gone in the latest pictures so perhaps you have removed it or linked it to a special unit.
- Nice to hear some new tracks
- Never really paused the game before using the pause button. Zooming in and spinning around 3d explosions is pretty cool and shows some otherwise previously hidden beauty
- Having no storage limit for Substrate is very nice.
- The new sound when selecting Sub Engineers is a bit ear piercing.
-
Controls:
All the visual stuff aside I hope there are some new control options coming with the game(for this game and base game). Top of my list would be the ability to hold down a button, drag out a box over a mix of land and air units, and for it to only select ground units. At the moment you have to either move air out the way first, often when they are there for a reason, or you have to zoom right in under the air. Both are time consuming and far from ideal. A similar option would be useful for selecting air, as at the moment you can only select all air.
Another popular request is to allow the easy extracting of a unit or more from a meta unit without having to disband the whole thing.
Final one I’ll mention is to select a unit and then hit Ctrl-z for example, and for all the units of that type on screen to be selected. We have double click now but that is not always practical.
Conclusions
No conclusive comment on balancing as I haven’t had enough game time, only had one 1v1 human match, and the AI games have all been on huge maps with different team sizes of different AI abilities. Definitely cool being able to put that many AI in a single game. Obviously some of the orbital and construction icons were copies of others and are place holder (New screen shots put up yesterday show you already have the new icons in – a little colour wouldn’t go amiss on the orbital icons, no? ). From the latest screen shots it looks like you have replaced all the wire frame units with images of the real thing which is cool (Though I was content with original setup too). I see a couple new units there too so I hope they are coming with the expansion too.
Fair bit more to the game now, will be interesting to see how it plays out with humans. I still kind of feel you can tech up very quickly in this game, may be too quickly. If there were more ways to ramp up eco significantly then I'd then suggest making a much bigger resource expense difference on some of the defence buildings and units.
Sorry if any feedback seems too critical, just trying to be helpful. I've tried to word it constructively. Looking forward to seeing all the new stuff added between when this Beta was made and the final release. I hope we can get it a little early just to make sure no glaring issues have slipped through. Thanks
Thank you very much for this. Respones and what wer're doing to address this next up.
"Final one I’ll mention is to select a unit and then hit Ctrl-z for example, and for all the units of that type on screen to be selected. We have double click now but that is not always practical."
This right here is my favorite hot-key from TA/SupCom that I've never seen another strategy game implement. Personally I believe every strategy game out there should put this in as it is just an all around useful tool for separating unit types (singular or multiple at a time) without having to zoom all the way out, double click first unit type, hold shift, double click second unit type, etc.
Looking at the most recent pictures it looks like you have now put 2 PHC defence buildings as upgrade options for a more basic one. I guess this is one way you are changing the progression. Leaves more room for other buildings later too I guess.
Edit: Also looks like you have put the 3 new units behind a gate too as they are grayed out when the others aren't. I guess a 3rd resource could be used to for future units, to provide that progression.
Yup, straight from TA
Game options and UI
- Skirmish Map options should show what they mean/configure when you mouse over them. Currently you have to open up the options first and mouse over those to work it out.
Good idea. Not sure if this will be ready by release but added to tghe list.
- The defence building, The Barrager, says it has a long range but can’t hit things close to it. Would be nice to have two range rings, maximum and minimum range, currently only have latter.
Text needs to be updated. It can strike units at close range.
- Would be very useful if you could tell how many metal/rad spots there are on a node when zoomed out in strategic view.
You are supposed to. They are supposed to become iconized with them filled or empty based on whether there’s an extractor on it. Will check.
- The new UI is very monotone, in some instances too much so. Please put some red, yellow and blue back onto the Construction, Quanta Upgrades and Orbital abilities buttons, even if the colours are quite muted that is fine. The colour difference makes it much faster and easier to click on the right one than trying to remember the actual imagine itself. You have also made these buttons too small I would say as they are used a lot.
Agreed. Working on it.
- Game Summary screen could be improved but allowing the clicking of the column heading to rank that column highest to lowest or vice versa. (how map selection is treated)
- You have moved the current logistics number and + button all the way to the top left of the screen but you have the current amount of quanta on the right hand side. So when you want to decide whether you will upgrade logistics now or later, or how much more quanta you need to gather before upgrading logistics you have to keep looking between the right and left of the screen. It is a nuisance and they should not be split up. They work together very well currently in the base Ashes game.
The player info is all going to be moved to the left with it all part of your playe rinfo. Only thing on the right will be the player list.
- We really need an “Enemy Destroyed” type message when you take out an HQ for all players. A) it is more satisfying and
We know when someone has been destroyed rather than just quiting or crashing out. In larger MP games you often don’t know.
Agreed. That should be in both Escalation and Ashes.
- A message when node lost would be most useful too! Especially as maps are so large now it is much easier to lose track of things. Could be voice or could be a sound and text displayed on screen. The latter might be wise as I’ve seen too many youtube videos where players get fed up of being told they don’t have enough of a resource type or logistics, so you might not want to add to that.
Yes!
- Economy bars might benefit from being a different colour to that of the UI. You could take things in better at a glance then.
Agreed. I think it should be colored based on whether you’re in surprlus or deficit production. (Green and red).
- The version I have does not have the zoom out phase/stage shown in the recent screen shots where you have a normal map view but the units and buildings are overlaid with icons. Perhaps it is different in use but I can’t say I am a big fan of those icons, I hope they are toggle-able. But if it allows us to zoom out further before switching to the green view then that would be welcome.
The VIP build up there is a bi told. We should have a new one up tomorrow evening EST.
Graphics and look
- Terrain has radar like dots on it if it is out of your range of sight, even if you have been there. Is particularly noticeable on lava pools and doesn’t look good.
What would you suggest?
- The Starburst defence building need some work in a few ways. On the building description it says it hits units in a radius around it but if you look at the weapon description it only hits small aircraft (this includes drones). The effect itself seems well overcooked, a big pink messy beam.
Agreed.
- The PHC Gunship’s blue light/beam would be a lot cooler with a deep sounding mini gun type weapon, fits the PHC much better too. The unit itself could have looked more aggressive, but oh well.
Agreed. Needs a sound update.
- Crystal Map. This is a tough one. In some way visually very interesting but it is also a very busy terrain so I find it much harder to make out units comfortably. Especially if you are a purple or other dark colour I find myself on these maps and to a lesser extent on the lava maps putting the brightness of my monitor up a fair bit. (Though I should state here i tend to have monitor brightness on the low side and that has been fine for the original 3 biomes)
I have asked for cosmetic options that will let us have more readable map areas (smoother, etc.).
- I find the new resource lines sometimes impossible to see at certain zoom levels. Zoomed right in you can make them out but zoom out a bit and on some maps they becomes essentially invisible. Some people might like this but it is too invisible for me. It might be a bug connected to the flickering. Seems best on the desert maps
Will pass this on.
- I am not sure taht on the crystal tile maps the elevation is clear enough in some instances. If it is the paler tiling then that is fine but sometimes it is a darker tiling that doesn't work as well. (on some slopes on the 3 player crystal map)
Agreed. I am having difficulty reading the heights on these maps. I will ask the tema to see what can be done.
- The Oblivion turret, the upgrade to the Artillary Post, has the same projectile graphics. I think it is important they are different so you know what you are getting hit by. Also for the beauty of variety of course.
Agreed. I would like to see more projectil elements here too just in general.
- New Substrate unit that buffs shields -will that have a graphic of some sort? At the moment it feels a bit odd as it is a big unit but doesn’t visually do anything. I would suggest a very subtle effect if you don't want to go with beams like the Capacitor, otherwise you overwhelm things.
Agreed.
- Substrate defence building the Disrupter Cannon currently re-uses the PHC’s HQ weapon, but a lot more of them, to shoot things. Please change this as it is a really big effect, but its too big, messy and not that good looking/satisfying. The original splay of yellow lines it fired in the Twitch stream a month or so back was much better.
Agreed. Will ask for a weapon visual update here.
- Have you thought of slightly modernising the look of the green/red/blue move lines? They are fine/ utilitarian but if you have time could be spruced up a touch perhaps, even just a tiny glow to them.
We would like to do this in the future. I personally would prefer splines ala SupCom.
- The orbital ability that adds nano armour looks like it kind of misses. It should hit directly on top of the unit. Ideally it would then spread over the top of said unit before melting into it…or something along those lines
Agreed. I can’t even tell it’s in effect or that I’ve cast it.
- I did think one of the substrate defence buildings was not shooting at its maximum range but later it did. I think more the problem is that if an enemy is approaching the turret does not always turn and fire when they should/can. Noticed this with the Substrate Pulveriser particularly.
Will be looking at in depth this week.
- On the lava map Logaun in the top left you can’t put the 2 radioactive extractors down, they are too close to things. Quite the handicap.
Will look into that.
- On the Crystal maps the resource lines flicker as you zoom in and out
Will look into.
- The red beam shot by the Substrate Reaper unit looks worse than it does currently in Ashes. I assume it is a bug.
I’m not sure what it looks like in your build. It looks goo dhere but I’ll investigate.
- On map Elysium, at around the 12 o’clock position one of the nodes rests inside crater like terrain. In my game the enemy AI built a bunch of stuff around it. But it was kind of inaccessible on the bumpy terrain and my AI ally couldn’t hit it with his Sub units. I couldn’t hit some of the stuff in there either so would have had to resort to bombers. Is this by design? I don’t think the AI can cope with it.
Will look into that.
- Pausing the game makes all the selection circles look patchy and broken up.
I haven’t seen this. I’ll see if I can reproduce.
- In this last game as Sub getting a lot of units not responding. Not sure if linked to fair bit of pausing and alt-tabing.
We’re currently in the process of doign an AI update for all the units for v1.5.
- First time hitting shift after coming back in to the game after alt tabbing still brings up steam overlay
I suspect that’s a Steam thing.
- Units dying while selected still takes away the orbital or upgrade screen. This old bug is the one which really drives me nuts.
Will ask about that.
- When zoomed in on some Substrate units with the camera stationary you can see they move between high and low rez textures. Particularly on the Destructor.
I have done some work on this recently that may help.
- Lots of flickering on the hover pads of Substrate units.
Will ask.
- Knock the AI back to just their HQ but with still one node and a few buildings and engineers, and then pull back you can see the AI has given up and is not doing anything. If you kill the engineers they rebuild them then they just sit there.
This might be an issue with incoplete AI. I’ll be playing around with this a lot tomrorow. Which race was this?
Gameplay
- When you draw a box around your army units the Sapper unit is also chosen, that then cancels what it is building as it is accidentally sent somewhere. It should be made exempt from selection if there are army units there like the engineer is. The Substrate Avatar also should be. Always selecting that with the army when I don’t want to and have to re-queue everything or come back to an area I think should have been developed but I had accidentally taken the Avatar away minutes ago.
That’s an annoying bug. Will priortize that.
- The PHC flying node capturing air unit takes forever to take a node as it is out of range of capturing as it swoops all over the place. It makes it almost un-useable as it would take it into neutral AA fire (which kills early scouting) or enemy player fire. Usage scenarios too narrow based on how it currently moves. I guess you could build a bunch of them. Tried that once but they never made it, darn neutral AA again.
Agreed. This is caused by its leash being too long (see steeringmodules). Will ask them to fix that.
- Orbital Jam actually blocks an impending attack, like a nuke which has already started a count down. I had (perhahps foolishly) thought it was a pre-emptive block, like if you were going to charge a position.
It is supposed to do both. It protects an area for N seconds. It hasn’t been balanced yet though.
It is very cheap for how powerful it is and blocks something far more expensive. Not yet taken note of the rate it scales in expense. The problem you are going to have is that people will hear the nuke count down and then they will be scrambling around the map to see where it is going in a race against time if they are the target. I can see some not liking this aspect. On a side not PLEASE consider making the nuke hurt/kill everything in its radius, i.e. kill the players units if they are also in the circle. This would stop people just dropping it on their own armies or bases when the enemy is in close, which is a bit of an abuse. That would have been my first call in easing the use of the nukes before making it get very expensive very fast and adding the orbital jammer ability and adding the mobile jammer unit, which may kill the nukes use a bit too much. Will have to see how it pans out. If you were to make so the nuke hurt everything in its circle you could reduce the size of the circle to make it more useable. No bad thing to be honest as at the moment one nuke can sometimes wipe out a whole base on some maps and there is no coming back, which is a bit harsh.
- Nearly all the Substrate defence buildings are unlocked almost straight away. I would think locking some behind other buildings might add more to the sense of progression.
This will get cleaned up this week.
Misc (some I would call bugs):
- I assume Sub shield unit is place holder graphics...though just seen today's new pics and it still looks mostly made up of dots…please don’t have the shield be made up of dots…I won’t say more on this till we see the finished article but...yeah
I agree, the Masochist defense needs to remain subtle but interesting. I was kind of hoping it would have a SupCom shield effect but they’ll need to come up with something that isn’t obnoxious but is a bit more impressive than what’s there.
- Camera still goes up and down with the terrain as you pan across a map, even when zoomed out in Strategic view mode.
That is odd. I haven’t seen that. The camera is underdoing some changes which may change this.
- An old one but it would be nice to see it addressed. The Chronos Blossom fire upgrade ability, where it shoots pale rockets around it in a very nice display is only visible when you are zoomed quite close in and cuts out very quickly once you start to zoom out. I think it is a hangover from ages ago when many other projectiles did not show when at maximum zoom but do now
Yea, I am not sure what causes this but will ask.
- I also noticed the Martyr’s fire did not show up when at max normal zoom. I realise this may be LOD type considerations but I really hope not. You can miss out on the scale of the battle if you can’t see it all going on and your judgement on how to respond will be based off inaccurate information. And zooming out and still seeing all the fire fights is cool too J
I am pretty sure we have a lot of control over when particles LOD out. The weapons LOD should not LOD out until you fully zoom out. I will ask.
- Was surprised there were no new orbital buildings to put some of the new orbitals behind. I thought there was room for at least one more.
We wanted to make more use of the ones there. They were kind of light. We have new orbitals in the pipeline for both the base game and Escalation but they’re future.
- The loud hum when you get close to units is still crazy loud.
Agreed. I modified the Terran background sound myself. But the unit hum is both a bit annoying and too much. Will ask them to find a way around it.
- Air power is a real viable option now, in that 1v1 human match I was caught unawares and it can really hurt you more than before.
Emergency Turret should be useful against that.
- I couldn’t get the teleporting to work. Maybe I am doing it wrong as it was worded slightly oddly/unclearly. It seems to be gone in the latest pictures so perhaps you have removed it or linked it to a special unit.
Will ask them to verify that this is working as designed.
- Having no storage limit for Substrate is very nice.
- The new sound when selecting Sub Engineers is a bit ear piercing.
Agreed. Already asked this to be changed.
-
Controls:
All the visual stuff aside I hope there are some new control options coming with the game(for this game and base game). Top of my list would be the ability to hold down a button, drag out a box over a mix of land and air units, and for it to only select ground units. At the moment you have to either move air out the way first, often when they are there for a reason, or you have to zoom right in under the air. Both are time consuming and far from ideal. A similar option would be useful for selecting air, as at the moment you can only select all air.
Future.
Another popular request is to allow the easy extracting of a unit or more from a meta unit without having to disband the whole thing.
Future.
Final one I’ll mention is to select a unit and then hit Ctrl-z for example, and for all the units of that type on screen to be selected. We have double click now but that is not always practical.
Future.
High priority is to select mutliple factories and give the same ordre to all of them.
Pressing F3 to select all air units that are visible as Substrate will also select the new resource unit the harvester. prefer harvesters to be excluded from this selection.
The Punisher also seems to have problems firing at units close to it, but is fine at longer ranges. Lastly noticed when I select default for creeps it sets it to off instead and no creeps appear during the game.
Last for now is there a chance to make the searcher for substrate not fly directly at enemies to attack. Make them stay back when in army or remove their weapon gets annoying fast when they run off to die.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my feedback, it's really appreciated.
"- Would be very useful if you could tell how many metal/rad spots there are on a node when zoomed out in strategic view."
You are supposed to. They are supposed to become iconized with them filled or empty based on whether there’s an extractor on it. Will check.
Looking at the most recent screen shots that you put up last week your version does seem to show this.
"- Terrain has radar like dots on it if it is out of your range of sight, even if you have been there. Is particularly noticeable on lava pools and doesn’t look good."
What would you suggest?
I don't mean dots are bad in themselves. But they cover the whole map if you look at the terrain and there is no need for them to be there.
"- Have you thought of slightly modernising the look of the green/red/blue move lines? They are fine/ utilitarian but if you have time could be spruced up a touch perhaps, even just a tiny glow to them."
We would like to do this in the future. I personally would prefer splines ala SupCom.
Yeah, that would be good.
"- Knock the AI back to just their HQ but with still one node and a few buildings and engineers, and then pull back you can see the AI has given up and is not doing anything. If you kill the engineers they rebuild them then they just sit there."
This might be an issue with incoplete AI. I’ll be playing around with this a lot tomrorow. Which race was this?
PHC
"- I assume Sub shield unit is place holder graphics...though just seen today's new pics and it still looks mostly made up of dots…please don’t have the shield be made up of dots…I won’t say more on this till we see the finished article but...yeah"
I agree, the Masochist defense needs to remain subtle but interesting. I was kind of hoping it would have a SupCom shield effect but they’ll need to come up with something that isn’t obnoxious but is a bit more impressive than what’s there.
Yes, I think everyone will be pretty much hoping for a Supcom shield effect. Supcom 2 has a mobile shield unit and does it quite well if I remember correctly. A very thin outline to the shield until hit and then it flares up. I'm sure Earth 2150 has some great shield effect too, flaring up when getting hit, but that is going back quite a few years.
"- Air power is a real viable option now, in that 1v1 human match I was caught unawares and it can really hurt you more than before."
Emergency Turret should be useful against that.
Yeah, I just meant it is good that air is fleshed out a little more now.
High priority is to select mutliple factories and give the same ordre to all of them.
Yeah, everyone seems to want this.
The VIP build up there is a bi told. We should have a new one up tomorrow evening EST.
Great to hear. Will it have the campaign in? Are we getting unite/region sharing options with Escalation?
Brad, , the splines you mentioned for the move/attack orders would be a great qol update. Making them bigger/stand out more/maybe more poppy color wise would be awesome! It would also have the double effect of making the nodes easier to see/grab etc.
It sounds like the overall user experience is being significantly improved with the camera updates, interface updates, battlefield readability updates, etc and I for one am extremely pleased!
Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
AshesoftheSingularity Forums