The reason why the game seems dull is the AI behaviour and general gameplay inconsistency.
First: I do not like how AI manages to react to the player. If I play a 3v3 in a huge map, AI is consistently spamming orbitals destrupting everything I do, ignoring my allies in the meantime; I'm not efficient as micro-player but this is not supposed to be funny, since my allies are not scratching my foes in return. For the same reason I find myself overwhelmed by 3 armies sent in a row while my allies are unable to unite their forces against our common target and stacking units in their base. Even I manage to ignore all the previous issues, by the time I have a major army ("major" means 50 units) plus dread\titans AI will outperform me with their armies and literally wreck everything with orbital spam (here again no retaliation by my teammates and orbital nullifiers are destroyed in matter of seconds). Anyway I cannot reach a real endgame with lots of units because everything is going to get destroyed before I can mass it. That's pretty lame since this game is supposed to be titanic in scale, but equilibrium is shifted to little skirmishes and turret-game. It's very frustrating when Leonidas is instadeleted by 6 orbital strikes\emp in a row (it happened to me today).
Multiplayer is the same experience: there's no way to mass a big army and fight in huge scale because the game solves in early-mid with small skirmishes and proper use of orbitals.
I really like the game but I can't get into it even if I appreciate almost everything else.
Did you try playing with orbitals off? Or the middle option, which allows some orbitals but turns off some of them. It might have given you a more enjoyable experience.
I think they could improve how the higher ai levels get quanta because orbitals can happen too often while they get their big boosts. Perhaps let them keep their eco boosts but cut down their quanta boost a lot so they can't spam abilities so much, especially when vs multiple AI. Or make it a player tweakable option. AI needs a lot of work overall tbh.
I don't agree with you on MP. In ranked you are unlikely to get large armies it is true but if you find the right people you can have decently large games. Plays out completely differently to vs AI.
I played with orbitals OFF but I don't think that cutting down game options will improve the game in any way. Orbitals are not correctly placed in actual meta, drone swarm and orbital strikes are too easy to abuse and their access is pretty linear and not time consuming. You can access them with a simple building and by the time you are spamming research points you are able to constantly rain fire from distance and at zero cost in resources, multiplied by the number of your enemies in game. You can spend 30 minutes in arranging an army and your enemy can just destroy 4-8 nullifiers (assuming you've built them) and annihilate you.
"The reason why the game seems dull is the AI behaviour and general gameplay inconsistency."
IMO, the inconsistencies are what keep me messing around with the game.
As to the orbital problems, I was going to suggest that there are unit nullifiers available as well. In hindsight, their range was nerfed a bit too much considering the army formation tweaks that happened later. Yeah, it is frustrating watching multiple Detonates/carving lasers insta-wipe the expensive vanguard of your army.
I have to agree here, Quanta is broken in the higher level AIs. Since they already have an eco boost, I say let them build the generators themselves.
AI really does need work, especially PHC. Is there even a faction difference in the code?
This is actually MORE options to tailor a game to a players taste. It seems in your case that this is not really viable for your troubles. All of that Quanta would simply be poured into unit/structure upgrades that will ROFLstomp your seemingly powerful units in a similarly frustrating manner. Ever seen a smarty/barrager w/25k hp?
I would encourage you to at least check back peroidically. This game is still a work in progress and that is keeping my interest so far, despite it's shortcommings.
Yeah I'm not the biggest fan of the orbital abilities. The campaign was enough of that for my taste.
At the moment orbital nullifiers are not well distributed among units, they just stand in the rear of the army waiting to be focused down by AI. I suppose they can make orbital strikes like end-game powers hence limiting their power and availability.
I'm not sure I follow your logic... I mean, I also hate the orbital abilities, but then I just turn them off? And if you're finding a match too hard on the harder difficulties, why not just drop it? I mean, I could understand if you were getting stomped on Easy or something, that'd be different.
I don't find the game so hard, but I think that these issues are not just "personal" and more than a nuissance.
Well, I mean, they are just personal though: You're finding it hard to remain competitive with high-level AIs who use Orbitals in a manner that you don't like. If you dislike the Orbitals, you can turn them down, or off. You can minimize Quanta. Or you can turn the difficulty down and leave all those on. The game is giving you a tonne of options to utilize, but you're electing not to use them. That's hardly a fault of the game.
If I didn't like the simulative effect of Forza or Dirt, but adamantly refused to turn on any kinds of assists, I couldn't very well blame the game for that.
Well I don't find AI that hard, I'm able to win on Tough and beyond (only in smaller maps though) even with these ingame flaws. Actually I think that there's an asimmetry between the number of actions required to use orbitals and the number of actions required to prevent them. Calling a strike is a matter of few clicks, while countering it requires a more intensive micromanagement (keeping nullifiers far from harm's way, put them in build order, counter orbitals etc.). That means that this is not a issue related to game difficulty, making the game more frustrating and less rewarding for everyone.
Not to mention that countering orbital abilities just means allowing your opponent to spend his quanta elsewhere while you still have to build countermeasures.
It's not like in supcom where to counter a nuke you build an anti-nuke, effectively costing your opponent more money to attack then it cost for you to defend.
But in Ashes the game just tells you that you can't cast the spell, so you spend nothing and take no risk where as the defender lost hundreds or those of resources trying to counter the potential of an attack.
That's all before the point that the games UI does little to nothing to warn you of a spell being cast in your line of sight or of ongoing effects, making the whole thing extremely opaque and frustrating. Which is honestly the worst part in my opinion. Tell me when the opponent is doing this! Show me and clearly outline the radii of the effect!
SC2 handles this perfectly. The game says "Nuclear Launch detected" and shows a red circle with a countdown, giving you time to react. Something like this would help in this game with the detonates.
OK, that one I'll give you: Supreme Commander handles "specials" better because of the risk associated with them, and I'd love to see a similar thing implemented for Ashes.
Then again, I've just got orbitals disabled, so it's really not a huge priority for me.
Well, you do have a cost association with the most damaging orbital, but that doesn't stop you from spamming all the others. When used effectively the smaller orbitals can have a devastating effect on your enemy.
That's a good point, orbital strike tries to warn you but you have to center your screen on detonation area otherwise you won't notice it (and you have to hurry disbanding your army otherwise they'll stick to the slowest speed and take all the damage).
Exactly.
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