Ekko_Tek

I don't really see it as much of an advantage. Even if you are stockpiling due to inefficiency, it will generally just be metal stockpile. And so I guess you can spam more Constructors and turrets if you want. Substrate got changed quite a bit in general - eg. having to build several expensive orbital buildings in order to build certain cruisers - so it will still take a while to figure the balance out. If you're stockpiling metal, yes, you aren't wasting it, but you're also not doing anything t

Can you please clarify how this works? From the Ashes forum page, logging in asks me right away to link my steam account. Which I think I did successfully. But I cannot register Ashes as a product within my Stardock account settings.

Replays finally getting in the game is one way. New players willing to try MP need to see why they lost. As anecdotal as it is, I've run into plenty of players that wished the game had replays to help them improve and understand their losses better. To Stardock's credit, they did attempt a tournament early on after Ashes released but not enough players followed through on participating. We have observer mode at least. Once replays are added and wi

Escalation should improve that with a population influx, hopefully?

Great screenshot top left. Is the PHC Instigator the flying unit that can turn owned territory neutral? Or did that concept get re-worked?

[quote]## Names Names Names ## The mobile orbital nullifiers for PHC and Substrate need names. Put your suggestions in the comments. [/quote] PHC Faraday and Substrate Damper (or Scrambler)

Steam reviews are essentially Metacritic reviews - no one should take them very seriously from the get-go. I understand devs unfortunately have to because discoverability is tied to it. Steam should at least filter out less than 2 hours played by default as well imo.

Swing Ban Hammer, Swing!

[quote who="Sonar_Taxlaw" reply="19" id="3646028"] Now I gotta ask, I've heard a lot of talk about the higher player counts and I have to ask....do people really want this/will they actually use that? Don't get me wrong, it's a nice option, but I feel like it's fairly hard to get a 4 player game going currently. I also don't really know what having that many players adds to the game besides more players. I guess what I'm getting at is that upping the p

Very much looking forward to this. The features and pricing and implementation model are all very thoughtfully done. Day 1 purchase for sure.

Giving a bonus to the weaker player will not help that player improve. It will just give the illusion of being able to better compete. I can't imagine how a system like this would even be worked into a ranked ladder or why it would be - it would defeat the whole purpose of a ranked ladder.

I've never heard of Zero-K. Planetary Annihilation is not a good example imo. I avoided it for many reasons but one faction only was certainly one of them. I don't think that game was very successful overall. I'm not sure how chess is relevant. It's a turn based board game that has the benefit of thousands of years of people playing it and it's proven that it has the depth necessary to make "one faction" remain interesting for what people expect out of it. Ashes PHC alone

[quote who="Nojar" reply="18" id="3641568"] Care to elaborate how this kind of single race approach would make the game very boring? [/quote] In exactly the same way as eating oatmeal everyday would be boring. You'd literally be removing half of the game units, abilities, structures, etc. that people currently can play with in ranked MP. An entire faction with different playstyle and different options would be missing. How do you expect most people to feel about that rem

[quote who="4gent0range" reply="3" id="3641408"] I personally still feel that Brutes and Martyrs are situationally useful. Against units like Artemis they're pretty bad (AOE just kills them very fast) but against units like Nemesis and Eradicator (Slow, powerful hits) they're really great. If you pair a brute squad with a cruiser, the Nemesis/Eradicator is likely (Not sure if always, probably not) to hit them instead of your "squishy" cruiser. It does

I like having both large and small maps in 1v1 pool. It helps to keep playstyle and game length fresh with some variety. Fast and Furious makes it so that you really feel every lost unit is significant and it's more of a tense, quick game that could end very quickly. I like that these experiences are mixed in with the larger, longer, more macro focused maps. I'd like to see maps like Cygnus balanced though. It's really bad for competitive play where one starting position allows fo

In the beta, tier 1 units gave buffs to the army group they belonged to - speed, health, etc. I'd love to see this return. Make the buffs small but meaningful still - this helps to keep tier 1 units relevant still past the first 5 minutes other than being cannon fodder for T2s. It also makes for some creative army composition choices. Removing it removed some depth and choice from the game imo.

[quote who="DasUnding" reply="43" id="3641181"] the game is more depending from where your units are at that point in time. Even if you think your units are well placed and you had a lot more, there exist the possibility that you lose the fight. [/quote] This is very true. Land units are more predictable and controllable here than air units though so I feel like the player still has a lot of input and control re: positioning, focus firing, timing, use of terrain and lin

[quote who="DasUnding" reply="31" id="3641077"] I want to have a solution for the early airfight and the AA problem which destroys gameplay on widely separated maps therefor:[/quote] That did look frustrating. Maybe Falcon AA right after the air factory would've helped? You didn't need to build all the rad extractors that early in the game. I was surprised at the fight of the dominator vs fury though - stats-wise, the fury should win - seemed like th

[quote who="DanailLazov" reply="6" id="3640912"] Marauder's blast has always been more suitable in cracking through defenses before big numbers appear on both sides. Now with Eradicator's long range gun I don't see a role for destructor. [/quote] You mean Mauler? I could see choosing Destructors over Eradicators due to faster move speed, cheaper cost, faster build time and AOE but Mauler will do just as well vs. buildings plus of course vs T2s as well. Eradicator

So many cool stories in this thread...

No. Having different units, abilities, playstyles, options helps keep MP fresh. Yes, RTS games, like many games, have a learning curve before you can reach some level of competency. Learning the game is part of the fun. 2 factions should really not be onerous for RTS fans to learn.

[quote who="Nojar" reply="23" id="3640398"] I only know PHC, so I was kind of prepared to counter drops similar to the Probing force or the Incursion [/quote] If you had dropped Incursion you would have killed the Avatar instantly. It is true though that showing that video is not a good representation of balance when you are that new to the game vs. a much more experienced player. Plus the issue most people have is how early in the game the Avatar can be deployed - generally

Just remember guys...textbook counter to Avatar is....Avatar + turret. Also, whenever PHC loses, it is never because of skill differential or poor game decisions...it's always due to balance issues! [e digicons]:thumbsup:[/e] The videos from Never show this quite clearly!

Looking forward to the new units and later to the building upgrades. The game definitely needs new blood. General chat, replays, observer mode, and a tournament at the end of season 1 should help to generate more interest and community I hope. Thanks for sharing the game of DasUnding vs. DanailLazov as well. Probably the longest 1v1 I've seen in ages. Hindsight is always 20/20 but DasUnding could've easily won that game. He invested an ENORMOUS amount of resources into Quanta.

@neinhalt: there are several videos of him vs top 10 substrate players, like the one vs shutdown. The map is a factor on how effective or viable the strategy is. Not sure how us playing each other is relevant but it's been only twice and we're 1-1. The meta has seemed a little stale to me lately and I haven't been playing as much. I do agree the avatar needs changing so let's see if the upcoming changes make a difference. Generally it gets boring to have 1 super strong cheese