G'day.It's been a very busy past couple of weeks for us, between the launch of the new Juggernauts in 2.5 and the Steam Publisher sale we had last weekend. On a personal note, the Agamemnon and Eye of Darkness were the first two units I designed, so it was a great experience starting them from scratch and seeing them develop into the final end result!
##Friendly Community##The other day I came across this Steam user review:It's wonderful to see people appreciate the friendly community that has grown around the game. I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who participates in discussions, events and offers help to players on any platform. I think we have a great community and it's a pleasure to work and game with you. The Ashes discord has been rapidly growing recently and has featured a number of improvements lately. If you haven't done so already, you can join it here.##Air Transports##They're coming! The designs for them have been completed and the concept art is being worked on. Implementing Air Transports will be a big engineering undertaking, especially due to the level of automation we want to give them, so it will take some time before they are ready. There will be two air transports for each faction, a light and a heavy transport, they will load and unload units via short range teleportation.Here's a sneak peak of the concept art for the light and heavy PHC Transports:##2.6##We've recently begun working on our next major update, 2.6. Aside from the new tutorials, the current plans for this update is general gameplay and quality of life improvements, before we get too bogged down with big flashy new features such as Transports, Naval etc. This won't be the most exciting update, but it will feature some changes that should make the game feel and play better.##New Tutorials##We're about to finally retire our dated tutorial and replace it with two new ones, the Basic Tutorial and Advanced Tutorial. These pack in more important information to new players, in a much faster and more interesting manner. The tutorials will be most players first impression, so we wanted to improve the new user experience and make sure they aren't confused by mechanics that weren't explained to them. ##Design Tweaks##2.6 will include some small reworks to improve parts of the game. Here's a couple of ideas I've been playing around with lately.Healing/Repair Rework:
Engineers & Constructors not being effective at repairing structures is unintuitive and unfair to Substrate who lack Medics.
Substrate Air Production Rework:
Substrate can get control of the skies far too easily, being able to swap all land based production into producing air units. It is impossible to scout a Substrate heavy air transition due to the lack of dedicated air production structure.
What do you think of these ideas? What other changes to the factions would you like to see?Cheers,Callum.
Sounds like a good update to look forward to. Also:
Healing/Repair Rework:
Wonderful news as a Substrate player, but this:
Will we have some other method of fully healing our units, besides the Nest of the Queen?
Air transports sounds cool. So long as they can't stand up to AA fire very easily.
Nothing more frustrating then watching air transports ignore AA in games.
Hi Callum
I whole heartedly agree with your proposed direction for 2.6. (General gameplay + QoL)
Comments on your proposed changes
1. As a pure substrate player, I love your proposed changes to the air production.
2. Happy with your proposed changes to healing, but we will need the slow health regeneration. Otherwise, why would we care if they are destroyed @ low health? If we know we could have re-healed and re-used those units it'll have more impact.
A couple of changes that I think are a must for 2.6:1. Make the interface more intuitive interface: There is no indication what the resource symbols are in an ordinary game. At minimum, you should at least add the labels in the tooltip when hovering over the icons. As a relatively new player, it took me ages to figure out which was which.) Small things like this do really help. The more frustrations we can eliminate for new players, the higher the adoption rate.
2. Bug fix: If you are hosting a multiplayer match, if the host has a starting location set, you can't assign that location to any other player. So lets say I'm the host. I am on starting location 1. I change my location to random. I can't than assign anyone else to location 1.
3. Feature: Alert system for when resources are being taken. Shouldn't be hard to detect when a resource point you own is getting drained. (Limit the number of notifications per point to 1 per minute or something so users are not spammed with alerts) Expanding it further, it would be cool it said something the lines of: "Resource point in sector 17 is under attack".
4. Feature: If you die in a multiplayer game, allow that user to continue watching. Just hide the menu dialog, add full visibility, and add a count down so the game is a minute delayed or something.
Have you guys thought about adding some sort of "Donate for accelerated feature development" model? I am sure there would be many players, myself included, who would love the donate to accelerate development. Example on how it could work:For every $1 you donate you get 1 vote. There is a prescribed list of items in which can be voted on. Once a predefined donation amount has been reached, the highest voted option is accelerated. I am a full stack developer and I would be happy to develop a system to handle this for you, if you're interested let's get in contact and talk details.
With adjusting the air balance please take a note on the following:
1) Here is no option to intercept squad of Strategic bombers or Air harbingers. T1 interceptors are too weak and have no armor penetration. What about T2 interceptors?
2) Here is no option to set patrol route for interceptors from factory. It cause the unnecessary micromanagement.
Please can someone put me in the picture as to why this is currently unfair for substrate? All Substrate units and buildings have shields which can be replenished by a Caregiver, similar to a Medic. In addition; the Substrate units and buildings also have Shield Regen, so both units and buildings can replenish shields over time without the need of a support unit (admitted the regen of building shields is quite low).
If Medics can no longer heal buildings does that go for Caregivers too?
Medic/Caregivers healing units only and Engineers/Constructors healing buildings only does seem to make it more intuitive.
Air production rework looks good but that makes balancing the cost of the Advanced Sky Factory a potential problem. I would guess the Aviary cost would need to drop to that of the Sky Factory which would then mean the Air Rampager and Air Harbinger unlock could almost be for free if locked behind a tech building such as a Subspace Streamer or Orbital Drone Relay which are likely to be built at some point anyway, especially the later. The best solution I see would be to make the Aviary upgradable like point defences are, the cost could then be slightly under the cost of an Advanced Sky Factory (would need to be less as you effectively only have one factory output compared to two with PHC to get tier 2 air tech).
Because shields are only part of the health system, and generally account for less than half their overall health. Imagine if Medics couldn't heal to 50%, and you'll understand why Substrate players are asking. They're basically screwed if it ever becomes a war of attrition. Plus, they have no armor, so that shield gets wiped out slightly faster than the PHC lose health. With Frigates, this borders on irrelevant - they die so fast, there's no point getting worked up about it. With Cruisers, this is a little annoying, because they quickly become too delicate to rely on, yet still take up an army slot. With Dreadnoughts, it's utterly crippling.
I would assume no, given that Caregivers can't heal buildings already, just shields. Plus they're so weak, no one uses them in such a manner. It makes more sense to let Engineers handle it.
Agreed, but again, you're worrying about nothing for the PHC. If you have an Engineer that can heal 100HP per second, you'd be foolish to try and force a Medic/Caregiver in to that role anyway. The bigger loss is the fact the Substrate cannot heal their units at all without a Nest of the Queen, which is a ridiculously large investment just to have an army that doesn't fall to attrition.
That's not true. Shields benefit from armor damage reduction.
Almost no Substrate have armor though?
Every Substrate cruiser has 20% Armour. Every Dreadnought has 40% armour. Juggs have more.
Knew about the Dreads and Juggs, didn't know about the Cruisers though. Figured it was just the PHC, given that armor is listed as something that is uniquely theirs: https://ashesofthesingularity.gamepedia.com/Post-Human_Coalition#Gameplay
Still, even taking the armor out of the equation, point still stands: A group that can only heal halfway is going to last as long as a group that can heal fully.
Your reference is out of date by quite a margin. The cruiser and armor rework happened a few balance patches ago.
Your statement is not accurate there are 5 Substrate units that have the same amount of HP as they do Shields, the Reaper shields for example make up 82% of its total HP. If you wanted 100% shields then a PHC player would be hitting a Substrate player with EMP more often and I don’t know how you would balance that unless you removed it from the game.
There is always a tough balancing act with RTS games with multiple factions trying to implement diversity. Planetary Annihilation took the easy route with effectively only one faction. Star Craft has managed three factions of which Protoss and Terrain Health regen is quite similar to Substrate and PHC respectively (I hope my recollection of Star Craft is correct as not played it for a long time), the Protoss can only regen their shields too.
Games I have played as PHC against Substrate seem fairly balanced now and it has only been getting better, the only thing that seems slightly OP to me is the Annihilator Cannon, but that is another story. Certainly none of my games I have played as PHC against Substrate felt they were won or lost because I had medics or didn’t have medics.
That would be Zerg w/regen, Terran has medics.
Additionally, let's not overlook the fact that Caregivers are Cruiser class AND work on multiple units simultaneously. I remember constructors could heal Substrate units, but the rate was totally laughable - has this been changed?
One thing I would propose considering the weapon range increase. Give the PHC Apollo radar. Vs Substrate, PHC can only field scouts which always run in front of armies and are not anywhere near as durable as Capacitors. Static AA combined with Drone Hives wipe out the aerial equivalent in a flash.
Guess I just didn't notice the change.
And while the Reaper has a pretty crazy ratio, it's a Frigate. It doesn't particularly matter much, because even at full health Frigates die if you look at them funny. Besides that, there's also weird exceptions in the other direction (The Martyr and Savager, for example). On average though, shields and health only allow you to get to half way through "healing". It's a bit insulting when your heavily damaged Retributor can't even get back to "half health", whereas any of the PHC units can heal all the way back up. And I've read that the Dreadnoughts are getting a small regeneration factor - this is good, it's something I hope gets applied across the entire Substrate army, because otherwise we cannot heal fully.
Update 2.5 is awesome! Love the new Juggernauts it was about time PHC got a Juggernaut or Dreadnought that could defend against air. The Agamemnon's long range missiles are amazing!
YES! QoL please! really want:
1) Dreadnought unit upgrades made less tedious.
2) Can build multiple buildings, click and drag to build, for quanta oh lordy quanta needs this really badly.
Thanks guys!
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