ledarsi

This dev diary inspires great confidence. They agree that their first objective was in fact to build the tech of the game (which, to be perfectly honest, was pretty apparent) and left relatively little energy to build the actual gameplay. That is fair, but it does make Ashes a relatively weak RTS entry as of right now. Having big plans to make Ashes the greatest RTS game ever, now that the tech is there and they can focus on the gameplay itself, seems very reasonable. I also like how

Ashes of the Singularity has made a lot of progress, but I still feel it falls short of its initial vision of controlling huge armies with advanced command and control tools within the UI. Here are some ideas for improving command and control of armies within the UI. Currently, it is necessary to manually issue build orders continuously to armies in order to take advantage of the feature of having factories automatically construct units. Additionally, due to UI limitations, it is diff

Mobility is about more than the movement speed of the group. Mobility is about projecting power, meaning your threat area is larger and forcing the enemy to defend a larger area against a smaller, more mobile force. In the ideal case, this means the enemy is forced to spread their forces to cover too large an area, meaning they are unable to stop a focused attack in one place. In this situation, there is no way for the defender to win because putting enough defenses to stop the enemy force wi

The Blob: "The Ugly Brawl" The danger of having combat be decided at close quarters by relatively tough units is that the entire large-scale war essentially boils down to the collision of two blobs, where generally speaking the larger blob will win. Like two barbarian hordes colliding in an open field, whoever has the larger army almost always wins, and that single confrontation decides the strategic picture of the entire conflict.

[quote who="ASADDF" reply="20" id="3582277"] you come and choose each T-3 by its own and upgrade it to add on those empty slots what you researched [/quote] No offense, but that is just ew. Do you have any idea how much clicking that would involve if you are building a significant number of these units? Totally mindless, housekeeping actions just to make sure your units are actually upgraded when they are built without the upgrades? A

[quote who="ASADDF" reply="16" id="3581752"] T3 Units cannot be build fast enough for you to have hundreds and go crazy on APM [/quote] This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how APM works in strategy games. A few, powerful, important and valuable units will demand much higher APM to manage than several large groups of small units will. Even though there are fewer actual units, the amount of potential gain from micromanagement is much larger, and the relati

[quote who="Shadow00000000" reply="5" id="3579108"] Tying the logistics to territories would mean that at some point in the game one player would have so many more units than the other that the outcome is fixed. [/quote] This is probably true as the combat in the game is presently designed. However, this is a problem under any circumstances and will need to be addressed anyway. Combat mechanics that become inefficient at large scales are extremely important to force

[quote quoting="post"] Hello Everyone, as everyone know AOTS is some kind of a mix between Starcraft, TA, and Company of Heroes. For me it has a lot to do with Sins of a solar Empire than any other RTS game out there but on a planet. AOTS is a Epic RTS games were you can have thousands of units at the same time for an all out war, and that's really awesome, so let me start telling my ideas for you the Dev's and the Founders. 1. The Seed (Ho

The network of nodes map design suggests to me that this game is supposed to be able to support very, very large maps. It's not really necessary with so few nodes, but it would be invaluable for giving structure to very large maps. Having very large maps will also have a dramatic effect on the economy of the game, because your home base isn't really that important compared to controlling large amounts of territory. Capturing territory, or at least neutralizing enemy territory,

[quote who="Shadow00000000" reply="21" id="3571621"] I knew others who preferred to expand quickly and were successful at that strategy as well, but I liked the option to do either and still win. The type of "turtling" that I find intolerable is what was featured in C&C: Generals (to name one) where you could build a strong base defence line with missle launchers to deter foes while building platforms to get tons of money and power plants to build whatever you want. This meant you ne

The problem with blacked out is that it does nothing to someone who already knows the map layout inside and out. In fact it gives that person a huge advantage over someone who is playing that map for the first time- which is likely if there are going to be thousands of maps. Consider how this will play out- someone is hosting a lobby in a map they are familiar with, and some poor fool joins and is unfamiliar with the map.

The difficulty with hard caps on the number of a unit type that are allowed is it masks that unit's impact on the game. A very efficient unit that has a hard limit of 1 at any given time will, if resources are available, always get made. This is not ideal for designing super units because even though there is only one, this unit is extremely important. A better way to do super units is to deliberately allow the player to

DLC depends tremendously on the quality of the original product. A very solid basic game product makes players, generally speaking, more accepting of paid DLC to add onto the game. Assuming of course the DLC doesn't break or damage the game (pay to win, balance, design, etc.) A weak basic game will make players VERY mad if you try to sell DLC. Rome 2, Destiny, and so on. It smacks of deliberately underperforming to extract more money, and seems scammy, even if it was in go

[quote who="X-Astra" reply="6" id="3568671"] if you let us zoom out too far then all of our little T1 units look like ants [/quote] I don't see why this is a problem. More than that, seeing an epic army marching with its powerful weapons of war shrunk to ants from sheer perspective is pretty awesome . [quote who="LingWhisperer" reply="12" id="3568815"] Icons are obviously undesirable from an aesthetic perspective, but strat

I am blown away by this level of communication- I hope you guys realize that you are, as far as I know, the only developer to ever implement this type of high-bandwidth communications with players. I strongly suspect it will ultimately work out very well because you can make smarter decisions based on input directly from players. Computronium I would replace "Computronium" with Minds, or Brains, rather than a cheesy name for a new compound/subst

[quote who="tatsujb" reply="8" id="3568447"] another (for combat) would be making units much faster and projectiles slow and very very prone to miss without target-leading and have all the units have their own target leading. This was the case in Supcom. it's very clever because you can of course micro units to hit a specific point but your own unit's AI was already doing something infinitely better than what even the topmost starcraft II player could ever manage in te

While I agree that many types of RTS games don't need formally defined zones, I get the impression that Ashes is going with it as a pretty basic design principle. Inheriting control zones from, say, Company of Heroes is a reasonable choice. But because CoH has a very small and discrete number of control zones, players are always forced to fight over those exact points. Implementing a region system with a LOT of control zones is an extremely different animal. <p

Wargame is probably the absolute best modern RTS game. It's fantastic. Among other things, Wargame's implementation of artillery is unparalleled anywhere in RTS games as far as I know, and I think Ashes would do well to have a similar differentiation of artillery. Artillery should fire at EXTREME ranges, but be a fire support asset rather than a primary source of damage for killing enemies. It will kill some stuff, and if you are prepared to wait half an hour yo

Absolutely agreed. Starting with a blacked-out map just gives a huge advantage to someone who has memorized the map, which is not good. The map should start with all terrain revealed, but with fog of war regarding enemy units and buildings.

Another point worth keeping in mind is that a really large group of units may require a more sophisticated system for handling orders than a small squad or blob does. I don't think having such huge groups of units will really work that well unless they are composed of distinct subcomponents which each do their particular functions intelligently. The way I am envisioning this is that a large group of units is arranged into a hierarchical force organization, containin

What I would like to see is a strong preference for large groups over individual super units. There are endless different ways to do this. Vastly more approaches than there are ways to design a super unit, which basically is a single entity that has some insane amount of HP and firepower. Higher tech units could be more sophisticated functions for roles you can already do with other units. They might be more specialized, or narrow in their functionality compared to lower tech

If this is a request for borderless windowed mode I agree it is the best display mode, especially for alt-tabbing. I think there is a bit of a performance hit for doing it though.

I agree land units would be cool as well as hovering units. There could be quite significant gameplay differences between the two- such as having land units be very slow compared to larger flying ships. They would also lend scale by contrast with the really large ships. Bots as infantry loaded into flying ships as vehicle transports would be very cool. Bots would be very small, and operate in groups as a single unit. If a bot is approximately human-size (does not need to be the case)

Core i5 2500K, GTX 570, 16 GB RAM, Windows 7 x64. Also planning on upgrading to Windows 10 in July/August.

It is my understanding that the reason for teching up in games like TA/SupCom is primarily to reduce the number of models in play. For example, in SupCom what invariably happens is that one player techs up, increasing their units' stats and resource costs. The other player typically does the same, unless they lose in the interim. This results in both players building more expensive units in smaller quantities. Even though both sides' units have higher stats, they cancel