Development of any one feature takes time. Whilst there are a lot of things on the roadmap, we thought it would be a good idea if players get to influence which feature will be worked on next for the game. There are 10 features on the list and each one has engineering time in months associated with it.
All of these features are planned in some way, but this is a chance to tell us which one you want to see come before the others. Choose wisely, because whichever feature is worked on first will push the others behind it for that stretch of time.
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Vote
I wonder how these items would place...
1) Improved Unit AI
2) Formation Controls / Behavior config & control
Naval is in lead right now.
I have OCCASIONALLY seen people ask for naval.
I feel like 1 out of every 10 posts is something about unit AI and behavior/formation control.
There have been a LOT of good ideas.
So anyhow, I voted for the graphic pass, in the hope that the NEXT vote integrates the above two items in the list.
I am, BTW, very pleased the vote is at least happening.
This is kinda cool, although for myself I kinda don't feel like some of these are even really necessary. Personally. But to be fair I don't even like the orbital abilities, but that's a different topic altogether.
1. Naval and Oceans [5t]
This would be really weird with t he games current frigates/cruisers/dreadnoughts. Unless they are going to be named like APC/MBT/SPG or something truly weird. lol.
2. Third faction [8t]
Yep, this is what I voted for. I wanna see what those pesky Martians have cooked up. Although I have a strong suspicion it'll basically be a Cybran-like faction. As the PHC are essentially the UEF and the Substrate are the Aeon. I'd love to be proven wrong however!
3. More robust modding [6t]
Always good.
4. Replace some existing units with non-hover [3t]
I feel like this is a part of the games charm. Never had an RTS with hover armies before, likely won't have one ever again. It's unique! I'd vote against it if I could!
5. Metagame [4t]
Like conquer the galaxy kinda deal? Ehh, risk style maps of this in the past have always felt really tacked on to me, and the campaign for Planetary Annihilation didn't feel much better. Never played a clan wars style of this myself, but aren't they just skirmish battles anyway. Not my kinda thing.
6. Fortifcations [3t]
I could see the reworking of the current defences into something a little less, turrets in a field kind a thing, but aren't the defences in this game already a little too strong? I just... I dunno.
7. Transport units [2t]
Personally I'd hope for such units as to replace the orbital insertions altogether, but hey ho. Cool enough so long as the transports aren't tanky gods who ignore most AA.
8. More start-up options [2t]
Always good. Could be great if we could get some kind of scenario editor for people to make custom campaigns and such.
9. Visual pass to make look better [1t]
I really need to get a better PC.
10. Lower hardware requirements [3t]
It would be nice, you can play starcraft 2 on a toaster these days and lower settings are good for players who want more performance out of the game rather then visuals. Good for massive, if low res, battles.
Well, a few thoughts on a possibly incoming new race. I recently found my my favourite Visual Novel (Muv Luv Alternative) is on the Steam. I strongly recommend to you (especially to the DEVELOPERS, you dont gonna regret it! )to read at least once in your lifetime, its not the #1 VN for show.
(Here is a link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/449840/MuvLuv_Alternative/ )
I played through it a long time ago, but i clearly remember the game's adversaries : The B.E.T.A. They was some kind of organic "meat robots" with a hive mind backing it up. They always rusthed to the battle , heedless of losses, to destroy, crush, chomp, tear, etc. Their units was mostly melee with a Laser and Heavy laser artillery/AA/ranged units. My opinion is to create a race similar to them, what favours quantity than quality. And another co-op feature can come with them, for ex. a map, where players can team up, or a player and a comp, to after a given amount of time, try to stop the ever increasing enemy horde, and destroy the Hive. Ashes is a Grand Battleground, so this idea will fit it perfectly.
PS: Sorry my bad english. Im not a native speaker.
Regarding modding support, i recall reading a post from Draginol, where he says the modding tools should turn Ashes into Nitrous based platform for creating your own strategy games - even space based for example if you wish.
I wonder why this is not made into actual product, one you would pay for, StarDock´s own RTS Creator. Pretty much what Sins modding tools were, letting you to import your own models, create your own units with their properties, made your own tech structure/ building tree.... add some run of the mill pre-made abilities (stuff like cloaking, teleporting, assimilating, spawning etc... - usual generic sci-fi/fantasy stuff), you could add to "your" unit, regardless of its type, be it tank, plane or space-ship.
The main difference against Sins modding tools would be the AI wont be hard-coded or whatever the issue is, when you have to fill entire unit roster in Sins with your own stuff in order to not break the AI. In other words, it would be less limiting in certain aspects than Sins modding tools, but still keep its Editor-like quality to be accessible to people, who are not programmers.
Personally, i would pay for that, proper tool to make simple RTS of my own, for my own pleasure. Since there are clearly many people in the modding community, i would hazard a guess, such software may hold certain allure to them too. Maybe even more so, than any other addition to Ashes.
None of this.
In the last months you made a lot of changes in the units and it shows you support the game and that's great.
I guess it has improved multiplayer, but I do not play multiplayer in RTS, I only play campaigns.
And ... I'm sure nobody ever re-assessed the campaigns with all the changes. Even Imminent Crisis is very inconsistent in the difficulty.
Seriously, has anyone tried Falnass with 2.5 ? It is just unplayable.
So, to answer the question, what I want is someone to replay and re-assess all the campaign maps with all the changes.
In the current state, there is no way I could advise the game to anyone.
OK, someone's being a bit hyperbolic, aren't they? There's literally no other macro-RTS out there at the moment, no true successor to the Chris Taylor RTS games of old - except Ashes. So if someone is looking for a strategy that isn't micro-based, my suggestions can basically only be Ashes or Total War. If they say they want an RTS specifically, that list drops down to Ashes solely.
And while the campaigns could probably use another pass, I managed to beat them all no problem, and I'm terrible at strategy games. Besides that, I would bet that overwhelmingly players will move on to Skirmish or Scenario, they'd rarely replay the campaign over and over.
Did you try Falnass with 2.5 ?
I also manage both 1st campaigns a while ago. Not the 3rd one. The difficulty was also terribly unbalanced right away for me.
Btw I played and finished: all C&C games, all Warcraft games, all Starcraft games and a bunch of others. So I have some experience and judgement on RTS campaigns.
I recently played through the first and prelude campaigns and what stands out most to me, other then the grating orbital spam, is how by mission 3 or 4 you can build stuff like juggernauts.... for no reason.
Like you have access to a whole bunch of stuff that you shouldn't have access to yet in the story and if you were a new player it would kinda be all too much to really wrap your head around.
The mission before I only just built my first cruiser, and now I'm expected to build and air force, dreadnoughts, juggernauts, orbital jammers and manage my upgrades all in the same missions? The hell?
Some progression would have been nice at least, even if some people dislike it it does at least feed you new stuff when you are ready to use it rather then expecting the player to figure it out on what might possibly be their first or second time playing the game.
One thing I found really funny was one of the prequel missions with the AI chick, picking up the new and improved Brute unit with the classic look.... while fighting the MKII brute as my opponent with a siege crustier as the missions boss. All the while Mac tells you about not having the prototype frigate factories ready yet...as the enemy uses modern cruisers and frigates to fight you.
It's just a little jarring.
No, I haven't gone back to that specific one, and I'm not saying that the campaign is flawless and should never be fixed again. What I'm saying is that an ongoing dev team of three people needs to be able to focus their efforts. 2.4 already buggered up campaign balance because they added stuff in. 2.5 added more stuff in, just as 2.6, 2.7 and every other update will. If they keep going back to correct the campaign each time, we're not going to get any updates. The campaign can be played and beaten - maybe not easily, maybe not in a logical progression, but it can be beaten. Until the next "big" update comes out, they shouldn't be wasting their limited resources retouching the campaign. Maybe once a Navy gets added, or a third race, or something else huge, they can go back and do a rebalance - including the campaigns.
There's a reason they asked people to vote for what to do next, they can't do everything at once. And I've also played literally every one of the campaigns you listed. All of those were released with colossal budgets, and none of them added new units that needed to be adjusted from the campaigns after release. So they're kinda pointless comparisons.
Which is why I did not vote for a new feature but a campaign re-assessment
I agree with Igncom on the campaign issues. It is a real mess and a clean sense of progression with the PHC has been destroyed.
I didn't vote but I actually hope we get the air transports and the visual pass first (from the things in the list). Air transports should really spice up the game and that fresh addition will help hold us over till the larger expansions.
Visual because it is meant to be bringing unit wrecks/husks and that is a year late at this point and I really want it in. A fresh coat of paint is no bad thing in an 18 month old game too, and the work on this is meant be close to finished so no point in delaying it.
Bug fixing and some control improvements would be nice asap, gets frustrating at times. Fixing the map editor and adding steam workshops to share maps would also be strongly appreciated. The AI needs a lot of work too.
I just played through Genesis with 2.6; it's fine, no complaints at all. I'll give the first two campaigns a try this month and see if they're as bad as you claim.
Lower PC requirements? Not worth the massive dev time to be worth it. Besides, hardware that can play this game is much cheaper to obtain now than at launch and will continue to do so.
Transports would have made more sense before the Charon. Besides, just how massive of an air carrier would you have to create to fly an army? It'd blot out the sun!
Navies got the top vote, but..... really, doesn't make any sense when all the units hover anyway. You'd have to add so much to the map design, so much to the buildings, new artwork all around, and then somehow find a reason for hover units to not work over water... It just doesn't fit. Oceans / bodies of water would be a cool cosmetic-only change for armies to battle over, though. Resource nodes as archipelago, buildings over water on (simple to animate) rafts.
Adding a third race is a huge undertaking - art, models, story for the matching campaign, voice overs, balance testing, etc. Save a third race for a paid DLC, reflecting the actual work it would take. For the immediate future there are so many other better options, like an Army mode toggle (normal, aggressive [chase], passive [artillery standoff]).
It can still make sense to me. I will agree that going forward, I'd make sure the ability to hover is considered a huge strategic asset, and keep everything on the ground. But even at the moment, Navy can be made important for the same reason it's important in Supreme Commander: Bombardment. Navy ships tend to have boatloads (Pun 100% intented) of firepower, fired at ridiculous range, and can take huge amounts of damage. In a 1:1 fight, ships can/should handily obliterate any comparible land unit. Plus, perhaps they could add the "Amphibious" trait to certain units, meaning they can hover on the ground, but not over water. Of course, tying in to all of this is one fairly big elephant in the room: The armies. If I make an army with 90% Amphibious units and a couple that aren't Amphibious, will the entire army lose out on the ability to use water as a shortcut?
I agree with you about the third race, but in the opposite way: I think they should do a third race and sell it. The revenue has to keep coming some how, that'd be an awesome way to get it.
Navies work for Supcom because unlike Ashes not everything hovers from the get-go. Homeworld DoK did this too. It had one faction with hover and one without, and actually looked pretty good. No navies there though for obvious story reasons. Shame that just a couple scripting flaws prevented a good campaign from being a great campaign, but I digress.
From where Ashes is now, it would take quite a bit of rework to remove hovering from most of the units, just for the sake of adding in navies. The PHC Agamemnon hits the bombardment itch without needing a boat.
Also...
What is this, Back to the Future II?
Oh, make no mistake: I agree. I'm just saying Navy could still have its niche carved out, certainly. Water could be used to provide "sneak-around" territory for amphibious units, could be used to provide mobile fire support from the sea.
Besides that, nothing to say the game couldn't add more "non-hovering" units, or bias the third race to be completely non-hovering.
Yeah, I realize I phrased that in the worst way possible: What I mean is that they could add in Amphibious as an exception to how units work, with the "normal" hover being insufficient to let them travel over water. If it's anti-grav tech, it could make sense (After all, hovering a few feet above the "ground" would still put them very far underwater).
Bugs! Please let the third race be bugs! Frigates are beetles. Cruisers are scorpions. Artillery dreadnoughts are giant lobsters with rocket launchers rubber-banded to their claws!
To be completely honest, that could actually make sense. We know only a handful of details about the third race:
All three of those points would fit within the definition of an insectoid race easy-peasy.
It would be the low hanging fruit of possibilities in my opinion to add the classic science fiction bug swarm race.
I defiantly feel like they could go for something a little more original then that. Something more subversive and parasitic as has been said. Something that can interact with Turinium in a bad way to pose a threat even to the more entrenched members of the SS or PHC.
That said, love craft kinds of enemies are also a little overdone these days so I'm out of ideas of what kind of threat it could be.
I said it in the other thread and I'll say it here: Ethereal Parasitic AIs.
Have them parasitically linked in to Turinium, and once they become linked, have them start hunting any life form also associated with that Turinium (Substrate or PHC). Once they do kill the other life form linked to it, have them take on its visage in a cruel mockery of what once was. Have them literally phase in their units from underground like ghosts, only partly real, and attack by trying to break the connection between PHC/Substrate and their units.
I VOTE FOR... fixing the existing bugs and gameplay issues first.
How about some attention to these?
https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/486065/Replays-crashing-always
https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/486254/Dreads-wont-target-or-shoot
https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/485882/Replay---Barrager-and-Oblivion-Turret-are-yellow-fuzzballs
I don't need new features. I need constant annoyances - some serious like the first two above - to be fixed. Take a look at the bug reports.
So...I am not really understanding the appeal of Naval units. Why are they even necessary? What could they add to the game that is not already there? About the only 2 naval types units that might be useful are submarines and aircraft carriers. Other than that we already have all the functionality of boats.
I can understand if people want the challenge of setting up maps where you have to cross a lake or something to get to the enemy, but you can do that type of thing already with elevation.
Everything hovers, what's the point of naval units?
One thing I would like to see that's probably easy: A better ability to run away. The units are obsessive about chasing down opponents, often to their detriment (say, by luring air units into a bunch of AA) and I just had a very annoying experience--two regions were close together and I hit them with a fairly large army of frigates. The regions had never been captured so they were still spawning--and my army turned back and forth, back and forth. Getting it to actually go capture a region took several tries.
Related, there's no good way to make something stay put. I was against the AI, I put a juggernaut on guarding a repair bay (part of a outpost with a lot of guns). An enemy dreadnought came along and blew away a good portion of the outpost--huh??? I repaired and watched what happened--the juggernaut was wandering around over a substantial distance (it was wandering into space I controlled), taking it far enough away that it wasn't reacting to an attack on the front edge of the output. Too bad there's nobody on board to take out and shoot for dereliction of duty.
Something else I would like to see that's not on the list: A point defense defensive emplacement. It would be a short-range AA gun that would be capable of shooting down incoming bombardment weapons. A couple could stop an artillery dreadnought's rounds but they could be taken down by massed fire. Perhaps this would be substrate only as they're the ones with the problem--PHC rounds coming in from behind terrain that means a long way around or an air assault (probably into heavy AA).
Naval could be a way of creating a new or different dynamic of battle compared to the swarmy/zergy style of battle we face on land.
Not that i'm in full support of it, but at least there is an interesting reason to have something like naval.
Doesn't even have to be strictly ships as we know it, what with our land hover ships for our tanks and so forth. The 'sea' could be like thick swells of gasses or even lava that require specialized hover units to cross, or aircraft. With units that focus more on long range bombardment with specialized amphibious tanks for more close range engagements.
Frigates could be amphibious in this way, with maybe a cruiser or two also being capable of traversing this new terrain but otherwise more special gas or lava ships would be required in place of most cruisers and dreadnoughts on land.
Which could be fun, so long as the ground-sea operations are actually exploited. Something that was sorely lacking in games like supcom is the ability to actually fight from land to sea, and sea to land even if the battle is asymmetrical. Naval dominance often made the shores impossible to hold when surely it should never have been with the right equipment and weapons. Artillery that can fire at submersibles, heavy tanks that can trade shots with destroyers and so forth. No need to make them THAT separate.
I've said it many times before.
I'll say it again.
why even contemplate stuff like naval when the biggest single thing that people ask for, again and again and again...
... is smarter unit behavior, and more options for army settings (i.e., aggressive vs. passive, formations, etc.)
My own recommendation is that these features should be delivered in the form of custom configurable command settings.
From a post a while back:
What we need, maybe not in Ashes, but in the next 'grouped unit' sort of game like this, is a programmable unit AI that you can set up however you want.
This is yet another intriguing idea.
It would give purpose to the meta unit in a way that would make the ashes meta unit fairly unique.
It would just need a UI that would be accessible to everyone.
And the ability to bind the resulting logic programs to keys... so instead of only having "move" and "a-move," maybe you have a series of custom logic commands ...
It could potentially be as simple as enabling players to create prioritized lists of logic settings.
The UI essentially would just enable you to input and sequence a series of commands/directives:
1. All: health withdrawal at 25%
2. Artillery: stays at range
3. Artillery: Target buildings
4. Artillery: Target Dreads
5. Cruisers: ignore nearby
6. All: attack anything in line of route.
7. Air: Don't stray
And you would bind this to a particular key.
So you might have U-move, or O-move, or whatever.
And if you use a different hierarchy, your units would behave differently.
(imagine what would happen if you moved #1 in the list to #4, or whatever).
Then maybe people could share their configs and key bindings through steam workshop.
Probably not memory/CPU load friendly, though.
But what a terrific idea!
This is really just the solution that I am recommending -- just an idea.
The underlying issues, though, of unit AI and army control, seem to come up quite frequently, in various forms.
I feel like I see the issue maybe once a week, whereas I feel like I see requests for naval... hardly ever.
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