Congrats, Brad. You guys just got Ashes to 1.0!Escalation brought in some extremely basic features that should have been in the game from the start, like the Strategic Map and larger map types.
That's about where the rosiness ends, though.
I still can't tell engineers easily apart from other units on the strategic map, and the Idle Engineers function doesn't cover engineers with a queue.
Bombers are once again stupidly deadly and almost impossible to stop from dropping their volleys without overspending metal/rads on fighters and AA.
Certain Orbital abilities (especially that turret from the PHC) are so broken as to be ridiculous. Seriously, you can drop that turret in the enemy base at minute 3 and wreck all of his expanding engineers and take a chunk out of his homebase without any hope of retaliation.
Controlling, selecting, and switching between units is still average at best, though it is much better than the original. It's difficult to select what I want, especially when multiple armies are involved.
Armies are still limited by size in a game where the number of units easily reaches ten thousand in a few minutes. Only one Dreadnought can be assigned to each army, which doesn't make much sense in the late game, where dreadnoughts swarm the battlefield.
The node system is incredibly limiting. Certain maps take this for granted and attempt to guide players down specific lanes while completely ignoring others. Larger maps also tend to go the way of averages and place less metal/rads per tile than other maps in some strange attempt to keep the unit count down. There's no weird/interesting changes in the maps, like a single node or cluster of nodes that has 6 or even 9 resource spots for people to fight over.
At the end of the day, Ashes is still a tech demo. It's not an RTS. And it fulfills that role EXTREMELY well. I appreciate all the hard work and the time you guys put in to making this, but it's not going anywhere soon. We need a new generation of developers to make the games we want, not the ones they dreamed about in the 90s.
I'm not entirely sure how to respond, it seemed like a good post at the start but ended in horribly insulting towards the games designers.I'll break it down point by point for you so you might be able to understand. I will start by saying this, this game is designed in a way in which you have to do multiple things to win and not just play how you want to play. This doesn't make it unique in any sense. In every game, rts or otherwise you have to follow particular meta strategies or weapon load outs to be effective in combat. Effective in winning or achieving a goal. Even in sim city you have to follow certain rules or guidelines to expand and become a +$ city. In sins you have to scout, tech in the right path and counter units just like every other rts.1. Bind your engineers and remember where they are. Don't expect game interfaces to do all the hard work for you.2. Bombers were at one point definitely over powere. But by no means are they now. If you are in a situation where you are losing to air it is because you are not scouting and countering. Or creating a defence strong enough to deal with them. The tier 2 aa turrets are outstandingly effective and you only need a few with the right regeneration to kill grouped bombers due to their splash damage and cost to cost they are much cheaper. Further more if you do spend the resources on aa/fighters then you are countering them directly and they are now at a loss on how to hit you. You can't tell me you are overwhelmed with ground forces too when bombers cost ridiculous amounts of resources.If air was any weaker we'd have problems. Like anything if you let it get too big it'll kill you. I don't think there is anything to stop 100 bombers from killing your nexus. But it's your own dam fault for letting someone get 100 bombers. In a game they'd be holding them back for an assault so what have you been doing with the last 15minutes. (hint, nothing.)3. Counter strats exist and it isn't difficult to stop someone dropping orbitals. I recently had a game where I denied orbitals with nullifiers, they are cheap and so dam good early game, especially against someone who's invested lost of resources into early quanta generation and orbital buildings. By that assumption you will have more expansion, ground or air compared to his useless abilities.4. I'm not sure how you can struggle, well actually I do in a way. When I want to select just air it's sometimes a pain but that's about it. Breaking and remaking armies is easily, not just a little easy but overly easy. Though I agree there should be certain hot key combinations that allow mass select of certain units or all units of that type on the map. It's a small gripe and one that I can live without.5. I've never played to a point where armies are maxed out, I see where all your problems are coming from. Although this game is a "tech demo" on mass units. No game should really get to that point. Unless you really are trying to play sim city with a friend and wait until you have 10000 units each. That's really not how the game has been designed to be played.6. It is exactly for the reason you have suggested. It's not to keep the unit count down because that's what they want. But because it forces players to spend tactically and play with more than just a standard 6 factory start and spam units. The choices we make when playing matter and this is exactly what scarce resources force. I rather like that, it sorts the bad from good so to speak.And really this isn't mean't to be a gitgud post but when you start complaining about design problems or about the game but have no skill in playing or attempting to play it the way it was designed over complaining it isn't just a cc or forge alliance.. which although is a good game is also incredibly boring to watch and play compared to games like star craft.- My own thoughts on the recent expansion. Thoroughly enjoying the new pace of the game. The new units should've been there from the start, it now adds much more depth to the game.
The games has already gone somewhere. Wasnt it 100,000 copies sold of the base game in the first few months? There are some things I dont like, but that is mainly the army system and dreads thing. And when you add a dread to an army all the other units run to the dread.. That should be tweaked a bit, but honestly you dont even need any dreads.. I remember making 2000 fighters in SC FA and taking out commander , but cant say it was easy.. It isnt easy in this game either unless you build no air defense. I use one factory to make aircraft fighters at teh nexus.. repeat the que make as many as it can..
I also find sub fits my style of play better. Thats a personal preference more than anything, and I tend to micro manager my reinforcements since I like to send them in bunches so they are harder to kill before they get to the army. Also get 3-4 armies capping points/nodes the whole game.. these will prob be lost but can hurt opponents econ alot. Whish putting themon patrol would have them stop to cap the points but it doesnt seem to so just hold shift and clikck as many points as you can see..
F1 - select idle engineer
F2 - select idle factory
F3 - select all air units on screen (unless they are already bound to a meta unit/army)
thanks for the f3 :]
I'm not really sure why I should care what someone who has so little respect for other people thinks. I stopped reading as soon as it got insulting.
How about because his feedback might represent what people who aren't being insulting also feel? This is pretty light on the insults overall and sure, it'd be nice if people could be polite with their feedback, but it seems like someone who wants to enjoy the game but is frustrated with the shortcomings. That's a valuable perspective, nice or not. Everyone's loss if you disregard that.
Although I'm not this games designer I believe the feed back I gave was pretty adequate. This isn't the first game where people have whined over design choices or because they can't play the game how they want to play it and receive the same results as someone who is using everything as intended.
I didn't find any of his feedback useful personally. Some of it is simply lack of understanding the game/needing more experience. Some of it is just personal preference of not liking design choices. There are plenty of threads around with good feedback and suggestions - both here and on Steam forums - this wasn't was one of them.
Do i have to laugh? LOL! So much Hate for gods sake
Mered4 does like the game a lot I see, he just suck at it and gets mad, i guess lol
But I do think hes right about a few things that i will love to see in the game too.
Like: having more than 1 Dreadnought per Meta-Unit and Make a Meta-Unit handle a bigger army
That will be a nice addition to the game.
About the maps not having enough Metal or Radioactive, i do think its a design decision, you can easily change those options when you create a game in MP or Single player, you can get as much metal or radioactive as you want. Or go ahead and make your own maps, they are so easy to make and if not let me know and i will do them for you using your ideas.
But in any means the game is a Tech demo, the game is very well done and I am very happy with it.
At least he said that he appreciate all the hard work and the time Stardock put into making AOTS lol.
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