Loving the game and also - music. The music just adds such a great tone to the game it makes it a joy to play. Also, the pathfinding and formations are just about the best of any rts I’ve ever played. It’s interesting when you move way back… Your massive army moving toward it’s waypoint through mountainous terrain is like watching water flowing for the first time in years over a sandy, parched, dead riverbed.
The Gauntlet DLC and v1.12 update was released today!
The update includes a new PHC building, the Refinery, re-done SFX for in-game notifications, performance optimization for lower-end video cards, and more.
Full changelog: Ashes of the Singularity: v1.12 Released » Forum Post by DerekPaxton
More details here: Ashes of the Singularity Gauntlet DLC, Now Available » Forum Post by Island Dog
Gauntlet Scenario:
Two Substrate entities are fighting an ongoing war with tremendous armies you can’t possibly hope to match. Can you somehow cross the battlefront to capture - and hold - the lone Turinium Generator in the far North?
Included Maps:
Tanuk - Enjoy this medium sized and symmetrical map, great for free for all, a 3-team split, or 3 player rumble! This intense map can host up to 6 players.
Nightshade - Join up with some teammates for a classic “comp stomp” on this large 4-player map, or take on 3 foes by yourself from a strong vantage point.
Frontier- Challenge yourself against your friends or the AI in this large, 5-player ice map. A single player starts in the middle on top of a winding plateau and must fend off the surrounding enemies who are mounting up to strike.
Hammer of the Gods - Duke it out for the tempting Turinium Generator in the center of the battlefield or seize control of all of the resource-rich basins on the edges of your territory in this 4-player map, great for free-for-all or 2v2 skirmishes.
Delphi - Set up your defenses on one of the plateaus dotting this small, 4-player map. Great for free-for-all or team matches, the generators and resources spread around will be sure to draw any turtles out of their shells.
Looks like all my (campaign) saves disappeared…
The last two years have been pretty stressful from a programming perspective. Like I said earlier, I think Nitrous will be the last engine switch I’ll have to make during my programming career.
It had to be done of course. You can transition to 64-bit, N-core, M-GPU engines now or you can wait. But as an independent studio, I felt we had to be ahead of the curve so that we can make things that aren’t done by anyone else.
Regarding 3MA:
Tom Chick reviewed the very first game made with our last engine back in 1997. He gave it a B- I believe. That’s actually how I met him. I have a binder of all his reviews (well all his reviews up until like 2008) around here somewhere with highlights. Yea, it’s a little creepy but it helped me focus what areas of our engine we needed.
Entrepreneur->The Corporate Machine->Galactic Civilizations I->Galactic Civilizations II were all the same code base.
Back in 1997, we had this road map of games: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur II, Galactic Civilizations I, Galactic Civilizations II, (Elemental) War of Magic, War of Magic II, Society, etc.
Of course, ahem, we discovered the hard way that our engine couldn’t do a land-based game without blowing up. We managed to cobble it together enough for Fallen Enchantress which does all tricks to work (including being large address aware to cheat its way to more memory).
But back in 1997, 2GB of memory seemed insane. :)
Now with Ashes we now have Nitrous. So we can go forward with future expansions and sequels that might have 100+ players with diplomacy and trade and tech and maps that are 64X larger than the largest map we have now and develop new ways to organize armies and units and battles. But that’s a long way from now. The first step was shipping a game with this crazy new engine that worked.
Ashes was a required milestone for us because we didn’t want Star Control, which has 4X the budget and uses the same engine, to be the first game we did with this new tech. In Star Control, every single planet in the galaxy is a full blown planet that you can land on and explore in real-time with their own environments, critters, etc. And that’s in a galaxy filled with aliens with their own agendas and reactions to what you do going on. Definitely not something we’d contemplate doing on a single core, 32-bit engine. :)
In another couple weeks, we’re putting out a pretty huge free update of Ashes that will start to show off how serious we are to listening to player feedback.
Every time I learn more about Star Control, I remember that I would do deeply, deeply shameful things to learn even more about Star Control.
We’re playing Fans vs. Devs for the next couple of hours. Stop by and play some matches with us. :)
Couple of dev updates. :)
June dev status: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477906
Ashes v1.2 preview: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477887
The big v1.2 update is out today with a newly enhanced campaign, new units, substantial UI and AI improvements, global chat, and much more.
Highlights from the update:
New Enhanced Campaign
We’ve really beefed up the campaign with this update. Since release, we have added 3 missions to this mode, and v1.2 brings fully voiced dialogue and new cut scenes.
New Unit: The Eradicator
This new long-range Substrate cruiser may be slow moving and a little expensive, but its attack power is devastating. In addition to its heavy weaponry, the Eradicator is extremely difficult to kill.
New Unit: The Athena
This new short-range PHC cruiser is small, fast, and armed with high energy laser bolts, thermal lasers, and a plasma bolt cannon.
New Global Chat
The new Global Chat channel makes it possible for gamers around the world to see who’s playing at all times. Finding opponents to play against has never been easier.
Substantial UI and AI Improvements
We have made some adjustments to the late-game AI strategies and now allow players to choose the AI’s “personality” in Skirmish mode. v1.2 also brings skirmish map sorting, the ability to add friends from the multiplayer lobby, more informative tool tips within the Army Unit panel, and more.
Full changelog: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477853/
BTW not to be a butthead about it --but another example of waiting and seeing before buying – it is unbelieveable the improvements most games make in 6 months after release. Why on earth play at release? they’ll patch, polish, and dlc until the REAL game appears somewhere around jan 2017. Its PC game SOP. And I should know since I’ve been playing pc games --well long enough to know. And it’s much worse now.
Wow this is awesome! As soon as I get out of hospital rpthisnsiniw one of my must-play games during recuperation. I am very fortunate to habe not gotten far in campaign!
There is no doubt about Ashes improving quite a bit the last few months but I also found it extremely enjoyable and complete at release. Played through the whole campaign in the first week and had a blast.
-Todd
That’s an interesting point, Kristi. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint on this topic. I’m relieved that you posted that here, because if I only read this one single thread to the exclusion of everything else there is a chance that I may not have been aware of what your thoughts were about buying games at release.
And just to try to contribute something beyond pure irritation and snark, as has been said in reply to this same post of yours in every other thread, the only metric a lot of people care about is if the game is fun at 1.0. If they’re enjoying themselves at 1.0 then they just get to enjoy themselves even more at 1.1 or 1.2. It’s not like your copy of the game self destructs after 20 hours of play so you must optimize every last drop out of a particular title.
There’s nothing wrong with waiting to buy a game six months after release. Hell, in terms of budget, that can be a smart thing to do! So if you want to do that, more power to you. That’s terrific. You’re a distinguished and evolved form of gamer that the rest of us swimming in the primordial ooze of the hobby can only hope to become someday in the distant future.
Exactly Kevin. Just because a game may be better in 6 months doesn’t mean it is bad now or not worth playing. This is especially true of strategy games that you may play for years. Take Civ IV. I bought it at release and probably put 500+ hours into it before the first expansion. I never regretted it, even though it became a better game with both expansions. There are exceptions. For me that would be a game like Stellaris because I don’t think that is worth playing now, but there are lots of people who do so obviously it’s not a one size fits all.
Waiting may make more sense with a game that won’t get replayed over and over if your goal is to play the best version possible of the game. I probably should have waited to play Fallout 4 because at release I found it rather dull. Maybe survival mode would make it more interesting, but Fallout 4’s content wasn’t good enough for me to want to play it again.
Kevin, you’re the best.
Nice work, guys. Way to drag in your baggage from another thread. You might not like what KristiGaines has to say, but unlike your childish insistence on being assholes to someone, her comment was relevant to thread. In the future, if you don’t like what someone has posted, instead of being a dick about it, why not let is pass?
-Tom
Damn, when I saw Tom’s name on this thread I was hoping he might have finally played it & was going to comment on it!
It’s perfectly fair to bring this up given the improvements in the latest Ashes update, but I think you know the answers. 1) For the social interaction with other people, which is going to be more readily found when a game is just released. 2) Because many of us have a hard time resisting the lure of the shiny and new, even at the possible expense of a better experience further down the road. 3) Simple impatience. When I’m looking forward to something, I want it as soon as possible. Frankly, I think folks like you have a much more sensible approach to new games.
-Tom
Oh, I’ve played plenty of Ashes of the Singularity. Not the release version, though. The versions I played were a bit rougher and didn’t have the personality that it has now. I really should check out how it turned out.
-Tom
I don’t know what you mean, I was just saying Kevin is the best.
It’s perfectly fair to say that about any PC ever made that recieves patches and the eventual price drops. That doesn’t mean every thread needs someone bringing it up. We all know that, and we all still buy games at release for any number of reasons that gets brought up every time she posts. It really is beating a dead horse.