Ashes of the Singularity Escalation (now merged)

[IslandDog]

Ashes released today!

More info is available here: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/475672/

 

[Elixer]

Now all we need is a SP campaign review...

 

[Elixer]

Apparently, the campaign is broken down into episodes, and only episode 1 ships with the game, and is extremely short & boring.

Guess will have to grab this when it hits the bargain bin, as it stands, it just isn't worth the $50 (or the $25) for the short campaign.
I have 0 interest for the MP aspect.

*edit, forgot to post the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crPoyVGbNfQ

 

[Silverforce11]

Now all we need is a SP campaign review...

11 missions in the campaign.

First review: http://www.pcgamesn.com/ashes-of-the-singularity/ashes-of-the-singularity-review

9/10!

 

[Elixer]

Don't know if people know this or not, but on the AMD twitch channel, they are giving away Ashes of the Singularity keys (10 of them) tonight...
https://www.twitch.tv/amd

Only 25 people there now, so, very good odds in winning tonight!

5 left...

...done for the night.

 

[Anteaus]

Don't know if people know this or not, but on the AMD twitch channel, they are giving away Ashes of the Singularity keys (10 of them) tonight...
https://www.twitch.tv/amd

Only 25 people there now, so, very good odds in winning tonight!

5 left...

...done for the night.

Due to the apparent significance...or insignificance...of this being April Fools Day, I'm going to avoid clicking the link. If I end up missing out on a legit deal, that's the price I'm going to pay.

 

[Elixer]

Due to the apparent significance...or insignificance...of this being April Fools Day, I'm going to avoid clicking the link. If I end up missing out on a legit deal, that's the price I'm going to pay.

Heh.. well, all I can say is I got a key.

 

[Elixer]

Well, after spending some time with this game, I would say, it still needs lots of work.
The campaign game is shallow, underwhelming, and really seems unfinished.
There are no voice overs for the text that is shown, and the scope of what you can do is really limited.

The game's unit are generic looking, as is the terrain. Everything is just really bland, except for the battles, then you get a nice light show.

The voice responses that are there get way too repetitive too quickly.
No tech tree really, they got "upgrades" but, that is also pretty bland.
Defenses are a joke, those can get wiped out pretty darn quickly. They are way under powered for any of the bigger units.
Air power? Um.. yeah, more weak units.
AI is pretty dumb, you can bait them too easily.

That said, the campaign game ramps up difficulty way too quickly, it seems they are trying to overcompensate for the lack of a good campaign/story by making it difficult to "finish".
The orbital items are... well, I see no real point in going for that, since they are too expensive, and weak. You are much better off spending your resources on cruisers.

This game still screams of a unfinished BETA as a game.
As a tech DEMO/benchmark, it has some merits.

Overall, I would say those that haven't gotten it yet, don't bother at this time, it just needs much more work.

 

[IslandDog]

The team put out the v1.01 update today. It address some campaign difficulty, AI balance, and several other items.

The full changelog is here: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/476763/

HIGHLIGHTS:

• General unit, building, and economy balance
  
• Removed “Fringe” map from Ranked match playlist
  
• Visual polish & bug fixes on forests
  
• AI difficulty balance
  
• Campaign difficulty tweaks

 

[Elixer]

The team put out the v1.01 update today. It address some campaign difficulty, AI balance, and several other items.

The full changelog is here: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/476763/

Is this the same Island Dog (from stardock) in the AotS forums?
If that is the case, can you verify what some have been saying that the campaign game is being re-tooled with proper voice overs and other enhancements?

 

[IslandDog]

Is this the same Island Dog (from stardock) in the AotS forums?
If that is the case, can you verify what some have been saying that the campaign game is being re-tooled with proper voice overs and other enhancements?

Yes to both questions.

Next week the v1.1 update comes out and bring a new unit, new maps, and additional difficulty level which is something many players have asked for.

Here's a recent dev status post: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477009

 

[DigDog]

wow ..

i played two skirmishes and the tutorial, i was not impressed.

another RTS where you get unlimited units; spam spam spam spam spam spam whatever you can build fastest.

the "nuke enemy base from orbit" thing is ludicrously OP for 400 quanta.

territory control just means take a radioactives deposit, and re-build a whole base next to it, spamming more units.

unit cap is LOL, 400+ without any effort.

a small 2v2 map should not end with half a dozen dreadnoughts owning the place.


design flaws ..
sometimes the cursor gets stuck and the map doesn't scroll. the unit noises are reeally annoying. i honestly cannot tell what unit is what unless i zoom in to a useless zoom level.
units are polyvalent; any unit does everything - who cares if you're building rocket cruisers or armor tanks, just spam.

come on, it's been almost 10 years since supreme commander, and this is what they think a nice RTS is ? even deserts of kharak was better. it's like it's been designed by someone who knows absolutely nothing about RTSs. and that dreadful UI ... cookie cutter resource system .. jesus.

horrible.

 

[IslandDog]

Just wanted to give a heads up that the big v1.2 update went out today. This includes the newly enhanced campaign, new units, substantial UI and AI improvements, global chat, and much more.

Much of this was based on player feedback.

The full changelog and info about what's included in the update can be seen here.

http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477853/

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I'm always suspicious of Star Dock

Shameless self bump. Looks like I was correct

 

[ZGR]

Shameless self bump. Looks like I was correct

?

Have you ever played Supreme Commander from Gas Powered Games? That is essentially what Ashes is. It is literally the same base game, UI, maps, and loading technique as Supreme Commander. Stardock hit a home run with a similar title, Sins of a Solar Empire. Ashes will provide the base for the next Sins. How is this a bad thing? Ashes of the Singularity plays like a feature-light Supreme Commander with low AI overhead. Ashes is not a feature complete RTS game. It will never be. Stardock is doing it right by investing in DX12 for their next RTS.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

?

Have you ever played Supreme Commander from Gas Powered Games? That is essentially what Ashes is. It is literally the same base game, UI, maps, and loading technique as Supreme Commander. Stardock hit a home run with a similar title, Sins of a Solar Empire. Ashes will provide the base for the next Sins. How is this a bad thing? Ashes of the Singularity plays like a feature-light Supreme Commander with low AI overhead. Ashes is not a feature complete RTS game. It will never be. Stardock is doing it right by investing in DX12 for their next RTS.

I haven't tried Sin other than a demo but I've been disappointed with Star Dock titles in general. They seem to be incomplete, I'll give them credit for at least attempting to fix them but they seem to talk a good game but end up releasing something different than they talked about.

**Feature light version is what I will hate** kind of like Sup Com 2...

 

[Yakk]

More AI improvements? Nice! Best game AI bar none just got better!

 

[SAAA]

I'm eagerly awaiting a space-based game with this engine. I don't care too much how well this game ends up being, as long as new 4X or RTS take inspiration and stop being awfully CPU limited.
Seriously don't tell me anymore of 32bit compatibility crap, dx11 etc: if I can avoid lag and have a chance more to get battles like in Legends of Galatics Heroes then I'll be happy.

Of course once that point is secured the focus should shift on campaign and gameplay, Ashes still feels like a technical showcase in comparison.
Hey what about... something like a Homeworld 3? Gotta tell to Gearbox...

 

[TheELF]

I don't care too much how well this game ends up being, as long as new 4X or RTS take inspiration and stop being awfully CPU limited.

The strategy part will always be CPU(single core)limited,starswarm only allows the PC to display a lot of units without slowing down that much but the graphics part never was a big problem,the problem is if you actually want all these units to react in a logical way instead of just flying around and randomly firing at each other.

 

[Elixer]

?

Have you ever played Supreme Commander from Gas Powered Games? That is essentially what Ashes is. It is literally the same base game, UI, maps, and loading technique as Supreme Commander.

What? Not even close! So what if it has similar 'features' to SC, it goes about everything much differently. Maps are a huge PITA to make on AotS and requires tons of RAM for the biggest maps, we are talking 32GB easily.
In SC, you can get by with 1GB for the same size.

Stardock hit a home run with a similar title, Sins of a Solar Empire. Ashes will provide the base for the next Sins. How is this a bad thing? Ashes of the Singularity plays like a feature-light Supreme Commander with low AI overhead. Ashes is not a feature complete RTS game. It will never be. Stardock is doing it right by investing in DX12 for their next RTS.

That is the thing here, AotS is not feature complete compared to SC. It is miles apart.
I would also argue that they are going about things differently, most AotS games are really short, most SC games are much longer, and have base building.
I kinda think of AotS as a spamfest of units.

As for the 1.2 patch, need more time to play with it before I can review it properly.

 

[ZGR]

What? Not even close! So what if it has similar 'features' to SC, it goes about everything much differently. Maps are a huge PITA to make on AotS and requires tons of RAM for the biggest maps, we are talking 32GB easily.
In SC, you can get by with 1GB for the same size.


That is the thing here, AotS is not feature complete compared to SC. It is miles apart.
I would also argue that they are going about things differently, most AotS games are really short, most SC games are much longer, and have base building.
I kinda think of AotS as a spamfest of units.

As for the 1.2 patch, need more time to play with it before I can review it properly.

I'm talking about the fact that nearly all the map names and designs are taken from Supreme Commander. You could literally check each map and find that they are all based from SC. I'm not saying that it requires 1GB of RAM, just like the old game! Also, compare loading times, loading animation, and memory usage to the old Supreme Commander. It behaves just like Supreme Commander when no AI are in play. I'm not saying that Ashes is an exact copy of Supreme Commander underneath, but it feels and acts like the same game. Not a bad thing, but it does make it very easy to compare the two.

Ashes is basically a shittier SC, but with multithreaded AI. I'd go back to SC any day, since an overclocked i5 can easily handle 10k units on the old game.
edit: Supreme Commander 2 doesn't exist

 

[Elixer]

Apparently, they are making a expansion to this game called Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.
This will not require the original game to play.

Plymouth, MI. – August 24, 2016 - Stardock revealed Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation today. The stand-alone expansion includes everything from the base game while adding features and content requested by players.

Escalation increases the player count per map from 8 to 16, doubles the size of the largest map type, introduces two new story-driven campaigns, adds strategic zoom to manage world-sized battles, includes many new units, supports upgradeable defensive structures and much more.

"Bigger, better, bolder - that’s what Escalation is," said Brad Wardell, president and CEO of Stardock. "We listened carefully to the feedback the players gave us on the release, rolled up our sleeves, and have created what we hope is one of the most epic scale real-time strategy games ever."

The original release of Ashes of the Singularity was praised for both its innovative game mechanics and as being the first game to support Microsoft's DirectX 12, enabling the game to deliver high scale with high fidelity. With Escalation, Stardock and Oxide have focused on making the game support a much wider user base.

"With Escalation we've been able to use Oxide's Nitrous engine to deliver stunning visuals while lowering the hardware requirements," said Wardell. "Anyone running Windows 7 or later with a decent hardware setup who likes real-time strategy games becomes a potential player."

The game, set in a post-technological singularity future, puts the player in the role of the commander of either the post-singularity humans or their AI opponents called The Substrate. That game supports map sizes ranging from small, arena-style all the way up to world spanning massive maps with up to 16 players.

All the races from Ashes of the Singularity get new units and buildings in Escalation. For example, the PHC gains some new defensive structures, a strategic bomber, a gunship, new combat vehicles and more. Meanwhile, The Substrate gain defensive structures including an anti-air cannon, as well as some new flying units and a unit that bolsters their economy, among others.

While Ashes of the Singularity has many strong multiplayer features, Stardock expects most people to play the game exclusively single-player. To that end, Escalation adds two new campaigns that provide players a host of new custom challenges in addition to the already excellent single player sandbox game.

Escalation will be available for pre-order on 8/25/16 and will release Fall 2016. At release, existing Ashes players can upgrade for $19.99 and new players can get Escalation for $39.99.

Not sure how I feel about this, on one hand, they are fixing things, on the other hand, they are asking for another $20 for original owners, and $40 if you don't own original.

 

[Craig234]

The new game is on sale - $30 for new owners, and the original game is included, or $15 for owners of the first game.

 

[KMFJD]

The first one felt more like a tech demo then a game so i can see them doing this.

 

[ViRGE]

Apparently, they are making a expansion to this game called Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.
This will not require the original game to play.



Not sure how I feel about this, on one hand, they are fixing things, on the other hand, they are asking for another $20 for original owners, and $40 if you don't own original.

Strategic zoom!