New VIP build updated

Thank you Sir

I cannot get the game to run after the Update..

I verified the integrity of the game and clean installed latest nvidia drivers.

I am on Windows Build 14951

I am going to delete the game and installed it again, i hope this will work

Update: After deleting the game, i went to install it again and it downloaded only 108.8 MB file, getting failed to start game, missing executable

Can you please Fix it, Thank you in Advance.

Update 2: got it working by disabling and Enabling vip build now downloading 8.4GB

There are some problems with the game as it now stands, imo, I'll tackle two here after play the PHC with this latest patch:

1) Smarty/Barrager/Srtillary Post

You have now made the Smarty essentially useless, it has only 3dps and 200 health with tiny bit of armour. On its own it is almost useless and is now merely a platform for upgrades. Yes it is cheap and quick to build but that is not the point. If you want to put down a quick smarty defence of a couple of smarties on the top of the hill then you better be prepared to hang about for a while and you better have a good eco. Cause you have to wait for each one to build then you have to upgrade to much more expensive ones. This just adds so much micro and you have to do it as it is such a poor defence structure on its own. There are so many better ways to do this if you want to have some progression, but the initial smarty has to be half decent.

Some alternatives:

1 - Either increase the Smarty to something like 40 second build time, 30 DPS and 1000 HP so it is OK by itself and still quick to build  Or frankly leave it on the original stats of 50 seconds, 42dps, 40% absorbed damage and 1500HP. The Barrager, the immediate upgrade is still loads better at 70DPS 3000HP and 95% absorbed damage, so would be worth a later game upgrade.

2 - Again, leave the smarty as it is in the base game and move either the Barrager or the Artillery Post onto the Sapper orbital unit. Putting the construction of the Artillery on to the sapper would validate that units existance a lot more and would also make the artilllary a later game defence, which it needs to be I think.   

3) Give the artillary back its own spot on the defence structure UI. Again have the Ashes smarty attributes on base Smarty and have barrager as an upgrade.

Either way I honestly think that as it stands the current Smarty is useless and adds a lot of micro. Unless you want huge stacks of them I suppose. I wouldn't mind it if it was a bit weaker than the Ashes Smarty as that is very strong at the beginning of an Ashes game, but not reduced to what it is now.

2) Orbital ability "Emergency" Turret

This thing is gonna make people hate orbital. You get it almost straight away and the AI use it against you a lot and very early. It rips up T1 and you can spam them down. If you are against several AI there will be bunches of these or the Sub equivalent around your nodes. And they come much quicker than you can realistically put down nullifiers...and they they will come down and kill the engineer building the nullifier anyway.

The problem with this kind of orbital is that they really compound what many say is the problem with orbitals, that they kill strategy. Didn't defend that point? Didn't foresee that flanking maneuver? Nevermind, just spam down these orbital towers. They are just aren't fun in their current iteration. I suggest:

1) Get rid of them entirely - the sapper can still build them

2) Make them unlock later down the line so they are less overpowering

3) Make their cooldown longer and their lifespan far shorter, like 10 seconds, so they are a real emergency turret.

3) AA

This is not as big an issue but still. It was good in the previous build that you could choose between good and poor AA. Put the good in important places the poor in less important places. But now you have to go back again if you want the good AA, easily forgotten as there is a lot to do.

Resources I get, but upgrading everything like towers is too much, nothing wrong with being able to place them down directly. If necessary make T2 engineers or make the Sapper a tier 2 defence building engineer. But all these upgrades really add lots of annoying micro and makes it hard to keep track of things and do things quickly. Please reconsider some of it.

I haven't tried Substrate yet with the new build.

Game crashes sometimes.

Your right about the game being very micro now, i did feel that in the first vip build, still downloading this latest build.

I think this game should be less micro and more macro.

Escalation is getting very complicated, too much going on with units and upgrades, there is no authorization in any why

Managing the Economy with Structures upgrades all over is getting very hard when you play on big maps.

You missed something and you may loose a region very easy, I do feel that you need to stay on your Units all the time in the game or you can loose them all really fast., why i do say that, because of orbitals and because of Meta-Units, Orbitals a very easy to use and they are really fast to drop them, and some orbitals are very OP, so by dropping a good orbital power on the Enemy units or Structures will be a kind of win in that Specific location, you cannot run away from an Orbital Strike,

and lets talk about the Meta-Units if you have a big Meta unit somewhere in the map and you are busy with building Structures or your busy with managing a second Meta-Unit, this first meta units will get destroyed easy because it does not do what it supposed to do, defend itself,

So you need to be on top of everything non stop, I may even say Its all about the APM (actions per minute)

But i do like a lot of what has been done with Escalation, its just the way you manage it, its getting harder.

Did i saw the word micro or im dreaming?

Escalation more complex yesss, sry guys but seems the game start be good then.

yes true! your 100% right, put more things in the game will make it much better, make it more complex will make it much better for us and every other player out there.

so many people said that the game is very basic, well with escalation they will get a lot for sure.

But remember making it complex should not make it harder to play.

BTW if you finish the tutorial then the ascendancy wars will appear and you can play all the single player story and Scenarios

Tonight's changes:

PHC Seed Armor increased from 16 to 24

Smarty HP increased from 200 to 600

Smarty metal cost increased from 50 to 150

Smarty build time increased from 10 to 25

Smarty rocket damage increased from 5 to 15

T3 Resource cost increassed quite a bit

T3 PHC armor increased from 16 to 24

T3 Substrate shields and HP increased

Rush Orbital cost increases at 25% instead of 10%

Drone Swarm orbitla cost increases at 25% instead of 10%

Each use of Mesh Armor increases by 25% instead of 10%

Emergency turret shoots 3 rounds instead of 9 per round

Emergency turret damage reduced from 10 to 5

Emergency turret cooldown increased from 1 to 5 seconds

Emergency turret base cost increased from 20 to 60

Emergency turret cost increases at 25% per turn instead of 10%

(Emergency turret is supposed to be a mulligan -- something you shouldn't really use but can save you from some cheese if you are willing to sacrifice quanta for a relatively weak turret)

Serpanttine turret nerfed similarly

Call Sabatour cost increases at 25% instead of 10%

this latest Build is so nice, i like everything about it, the way you changed the upgrade options and how you added them, i played a big game with Substrate today and i did see something that i think it may be a bug or maybe not.

• When you upgrade a defense structure the Defense Structure should get more HP after upgrading? if yes then its not doing it,
• Ctrl Grouping units did not work in the latest vip build
• adding -modding does not work anymore, the game does not open at all.
• in Steam when launching game it will not give you the option to play in DX11 or DX12, it will go directly to DX11
• Is there a way to add restart map/scenario/single player in the Option menu? so we don't have to leave the game and do it again

i like to ask if there is a way for you guys to make the air units look better How an Airplane Turns. use  or animate the air units when they move right or left to do a 45 degree movement.

something you see in this picture

Banking the airplane causes the lift force to tilt,
which pulls the airplane in the direction of the bank.
Technically, it's the horizontal component of
the lift force that makes the airplane turn.

that may be something stupid but it will be nice to see it in the game.

i will try PHC later.

I have yet to try it but those new patch notes certainly deal with the Emergency turret very well. Improvements to the Smarty are welcome too, though obviously having them much weaker than in base Ashes is part of a balance reshuffle I suppose. I haven't looked at Substrate in the same depth so I don't know if their initial point defences have been weakened or not, though I guess they were less tough than PHC to begin with in base Ashes.

Nice to see drone swarm go up in price faster, that is very powerful.

One think I noticed in the gaming vs the AI is that they love to use their orbitals right on the centre of nodes, sometimes to their detriment...they essentially missed my army with a nuke by doing that once and killed about 3 units when if they had shifted it over a bit they would have killed 80 odd (no orbital defences in the area). The same has happened with Plasma storm too.

The radius of the mobile nullifier seemed a little small...though this depends on how it works. If it stops any overlap of say a nukes circle then it will give decent protection, but if you can put the centre of the nuke just outside the circle then the blast range of the nuke will kill everything or nearly everything which is meant to be protected anyway. If it is the former that would be interesting to know, it would explain why the range of a nullifier sometimes seems greater than you would expect.

If the orbital jamming nullifier successfully jams an orbital it would be nice if there was some kind of quick graphic, just to get that feedback. Same if someone blocks yours, so you know they did something and it wasn't a bug.

T3 changes sound good. They will need to be that much tougher to survive the new defence buildings power and also to be a worrying site to behold. Also cost increase is welcome so you don't get a sea of them and normal units stay relevant throughout.

Time to give the new patch a whirl...

(Edit, oops, wasn't a new patch, just new notes)

(This was a double post but there was one other thing I forget to mention so might as well use this)

I turn off the icons which go over the units in the middle map, much prefer just seeing the units. However when things are working correcting (I'm assuming) on the first zoom level out to the strategic map I still get to see the more detailed icons of units moving, which is fine, and then if I move another notch I just get the simplified dots, which is fine again. I zoom out with mouse wheel. However, sometimes, seemingly randomly, on the first notch out into strategic zoom it will not show the detailed icons. You can seem them flash up briefly and then its past. Trying it with the mouse over different levels of terrain at first seemed to be the cause but then on other parts of the map it didn't hold true. Either way it seems to be a bug. 

Also, when you are in strategic view it only shows what resources are around the nodes that you have immediate vision on. If you don't have vision you don't know how many resources are around a given node. This would be extremely useful to have for obvious reasons. If the terrain is hidden in pre-game match settings then not seeing them is fine but even when the terrain is revealed so you can see the whole map and can see where the resources are when panning around the normal map it still does not show them in strategic mode, which I believe it is meant to.

I think the LOD on the units is pretty aggressive (and the terrain tbh) and I can see why that is the default as it is pretty demanding game, but it would be nice to have a tick box type option simply labeled, "less aggressive LODs" or something, with a mouse over explanation and warning it requires high end GPU with lots of VRAM. Not an urgent feature true, but just thought I'd put it out there.

New patch dropped today, I like the changes you mention above and also the changed crystal terrain is definitely more readable than before so +1 there too.

ASAD mentioned it before but I am still sometimes seeing units getting shot by something they can hit and they are not turning and shooting. No reaction what so ever.

We definitely need some indicator that a unit, most likely T3, has recieved that nano armour, because the AI ally likes to give it to you but it is super easy to miss that happening, so when you go to give it to your T3 you can't. Will be confusing for some for sure.

Yes it does happen to me too, the problem does not happen to the Meta-units but to units who are not inside the meta-Units, mostly T1/T2 units

I do think its a bug.

Just give it a try, create a bunch of Meta-units and start sending them to all you regions for defense, I am not saying always happen but yes like 80%

what I normally do is send 3-T3 with a bunch of T1/T2 with them in Meta-units and I just leave them alone, when the enemy comes to a region were I have some units defending it they just get crushed by the enemy because they don't attack back.

But I did feel that the units got better with the latest vip update, they are more responsive but still its like a 50/50 now.

Hello I want to know if it can be done

• When I build a bunch T1/T2 Units  and i have 3 dreadnoughts there waiting for me to add to them the smaller units, if I choose the 3 dreadnoughts and choose all the T1/T2 units and click on Form Army, those T1/T2 units get divided by the 3 dreadnoughts equally, and i think that was an awesome part of the game, but now it does not work anymore, is there a way to make it work like before?

• Bug: The bug still there, when I zoom all the way out to strategic zoom and click to move my Meta-Units to a different location those units loose their Path-finding and they hit the wall.

After along week last week I'm finally getting into the updated build...

So excited!!!

I can't get into the VIP Build.

I've done what ASADDF did by disabling the Beta option, and then renabling after about a 100 MB download.

Redoing the 9.2 GB download one more time...

did you get it to work?

Negative.

Re-verified the cache as well to no avail...

Steam shows "Running..." and then after about 2 seconds it shuts down, "Syncing...", and nothing.

No windows come up, I'm just mentioning what I see while looking at the Library after hitting Play.

Got it!!!

I had the "-modding" flag in the launch parameters.

Remove it and the game launches (VIP Build).  It worked before this update, so not sure what is going on there.

• Intro VO work
• Haalee VO is missing the word "quantum" in the text on screen.

Sentry unit not to showing overlay icon when zoomed out to "tactical?" view.

Flashing ground texture across map at the end of Ceres.  During the VO from Mac.

I'll play again to note these challenges.  Same issues.

***

When selecting four Assemblies, creating a build que.  The buildings all show "Repeat Que" marked, but it truly isn't.  I have to select each building individually, unselect Repeat Que, and the reselect Repeat Que for it to work.

Barrager Turret is stuck at about 40% build.  I'm not able to kill it.  Enemy AI is building it.

Happened three times in one save file.  I will save where I'm at, there's two more I'm trying to take down.  It appears as though they were under construction, and got stuck that way.

Below is a link to the save file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8WGNvVa3GZZUFRtMkdscWVzaGs/view?usp=sharing

Anyone finding performance on the first mission in single player is pretty poor compared to even the benchmark? Hoping there's some optimisation to be done yet.

Most escalation players will be trying that for the first time.

Certainly on the low side for me too. Though skirmish games on Crystal maps all seem to suffer from it too. I guess it is a more demanding biome?

yes true and i think we had to re-download the game for nothing lol

Sorry a forgot to mention to delete the -modding from the executable. I think this is the main problem.

I was doing normal skirmish all the time, but i will give single player a try later to see how it will run on my PC.

 Sorry if this was already posted, but couldnt find it.  Where do i Download the VIP build?

You can find that info for the VIP build in this link

https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/479782/page/1/#replies

or another preview build in this link.

https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/480334/page/1/#3656452

try both of them and good luck