Great game. Didn't like it at first. Not sure why anymore. Love it now. There's a lot of strategic depth regarding what to capture and when, which positions to maintain, what to build.
Need an easy way to select dreadnoughts for upgrading. It's a pain picking them out of big groups. Preferably a way to tab through the dreadnoughts in a group, like with capital ships in Sins of a Solar Empire.
It would be nice to be able to see the range on orbital nullifiers. Holding alt while one is selected doesn't seem to do anything.
Sometimes I select a group, click A for attack move, and then left click on a spot and nothing happens. The cursor gets into a funky state and I have to right click to clear it then start over. I'm not sure how to reliably reproduce this.
Would like to be able to sort the maps by size and number of players.
Armory, sky factory, etc should let you queue units while the first instance of the building is being built. Factory allows this.
The dreadnought upgrade notification voice gets really loud and distorted sometimes. It might be when there are multiple upgrades popping at once, but I'm not sure.
Need to be able to set attack move, waypoints, patrol routes, etc from factories, not just a single exit destination.
The sentinel turret is too strong. I hate playing against PHC because every time I attack even a little resource site, I have to pay attention, zoom in, and target the sentinel turrets first or I lose dreadnoughts.
I've only tried it a few times, but substrate seems underpowered. PHC has the healing and tankiness of the hyperion, the dreadnought killing power of the sentinel turret, and frigates that can heal other units and buildings. The hyperion alone makes PHC much more attractive to me.
PHC anti-air turrets are too weak. I'm starting to think it would be better to just use AA cruisers - bigger range, they can move around, and the seem to do more damage than the turrets. Building planes for air defense is too expensive, laggy, and you can't set a patrol route from the factory.
The challenging AI is too easy. It's predictable. It starts off slow. I grab and hold territory in the beginning a lot faster than it does. Basically my start looks like:
send the initial engineer to the nearest metal deposit, capture it, and queue it up to build extractors on the metal spots around it and the base, then to assist the factory if you're still producing brutes to capture nearby sites
build an engineer and have him build and then assist a factory
repeat build a stream of brutes, about 10 or so, and send them off to capture sites; 1 brute group for the first 2 or 3 sites, 2 brutes for the rest; as sites are captured send the first brutes to help the ones farther away -- end up with 8 or so sites very quickly while the AI has maybe 3, along with a large group of brutes that you should send off on a rampage once the nearby sites are yours
build extractors on all the deposits you think you'll able to hold
the engineer assisting the factory switches to building a quantum relay when radioactives are available; often I just queue him up to build 20 or so, unless there's a resource shortage on the map
build 2 more engineers - 1 builds a radar tower (multiple if needed - radar coverage is very important), a nullifier, and then a crap ton of anti-air (really, 20 or so - the AI is really annoying about blowing up random things in your base with bombers, then you have to search around to figure out if you lost a nullifier or extractor or anything else important); the other engineer does armory or amp or more extractors
start building functional groups (QWER) from the factory instead of just brutes, get a good size, maybe a dozen units, and queue it to capture all nearby sites and/or capture enemy sites (not the ones that are too near the enemy base - those will have fixed defenses already); 2 or 3 groups like this capture everything within reach and start taking territory from the AI
as metal allows build another 4 or so engineers just to have them around for things like rebuilding extractors or constructing radars further out, or even spamming smarties if rads are short and metal is in excess
build a dreadnought launch when the quantum relay is done - the whole point is to get to cranking dreadnoughts as soon as possible; the tanky healing one with the artillery one make a great combo; build groups of those to defend and harass, and eventually extra groups to send out to attack enemy territory; group them with all your available frigates and cruisers
I agree with nearly all your points, though not a 100% sure on Sentinel being too powerful or the AA, just not observed it enough. PHC AA was made a lot cheaper in Beta 2, which was good, cost way too much before.
Perhaps there could be a hotkey you could hit when a Dread levels up and it selects it for you by default so you don't have to pick it out of a crowd?
Perhaps the buttons for the different Dread upgrades could be bigger too, or perhaps have them appear out the left side of the screen at a decent size.
Not sure I like the Dread being able to heal instantly. I realise you then lose the chance to add an extra ability if you opt for the heal everytime but instant 100% heal feels too much. Maybe 50% or maybe a slow heal would be preferable. A slow healing ability is often one of the upgrades so a 50% instead seems better.
more than a hotkey this game by Frogboy's own claim's is oriented to casuals. so if that feature is keyboard only it'll be a problem. but yeah I hand't mentioned it but it's really hard to upgrade dreads currently.
Ashes isn't a "Casual" game.
The upgrades work the same way they did in Sins of a Solar Empire. We can evaluate adding some options after release for those who want additional automation options.
No one is asking for automation. I want an easier way to select dreadnoughts when they are in a large group. Clicking on the dreadnought that has an available upgrade when it's in a group with other dreadnoughts and many other smaller vessels, especially when they are moving around and all clumped up, is difficult. In Sins you could tab select through the capital ships in a group.
If the Dreadnought is in a control group it'll appear in the empire tree. The one with an upgrade will appear there and can be selected.
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