I am so incredibly excited to see what you do with Star Control. SC2 is still one of my favorite games of all time. What an amazing game that was.
You don’t know what I mean? If that was your attempt at humor, it fell pretty flat. If you can’t understand a very simple rule about not being a dick because of something that happened in another thread, let’s just go ahead and close the account. The proper response isn’t to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.
The only dead horse being beaten is a couple of assholes griefing someone for voicing something on her mind. Ease up. I’m not sure what makes you guys so thin skinned that you feel you’re being attacked or that KristiGaines is derailing threads. She’s not the problem here.
-Tom
Jeez, Tom, contrary to QT3 lore there are actually other ways to be sure.
New Turtle Wars DLC out today for Ashes with new maps and scenarios! :)
Info here: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/477956/
Scenarios
Implosion - Race against three enemies to be the first to crack the defenses of a crashed Post-Human and their experimental Turinium Generator.
Eruption - Cut off from your factories, you must command a single Hyperion Dreadnought and a scattering of defensive structures to turn the tides of battle.
Mountaintop - Exploit your resource-heavy advantage and create massive forces to climb the mountain to the enemy entrenchment and wipe them out.
Turtle Wars - Hold off the frigates swarming from indestructible factories and survive the siege. Reprogram the factories to your advantage before the enemy crosses the mountain and finishes you off.
Maps
Crack the Shell - Hold the high ground and the Turinium against your enemies in this asymmetrical 3-player map, best for 2v1 matches.
Turtle Wars - Enjoy a longer duel with your enemy on this epic-scale 2-player map. The open landscape with select chokepoints encourages huge armies and larger battles.
Eruption - Choose your path wisely - one leads to the lone Turinium Generator, the other to resources in this small 2-player map.
Implosion - One valley with an abundance of resources stands at the center of this large, asymmetrical map fit for a 4-player free for all with huge armies.
DLC and patch today! Very interested in feedback on the DLC (four maps, four scenarios, $3.99) if anyone picks it up.
In other news, I just watched one of our top players smoosh Brad into a fine paste and it was fascinating. He’s way, way better than I am, heh.
Finally beat the last level of the Campaign - wow, that was tough. Key was keeping Mac alive long enough to take Athena out. Went to bed way too late on a work night and overslept, but for the first time I felt I had tilted the map enough in my favor that I had to finish it!
Congrats! That mission definitely tests your ability to quickly expand, defend chokepoints, and aid an ally while also building enough of a hammer to smash an enemy player with.
Did you guys know that there’s a Steam sale going on?
Well, if you didn’t, let me tell you something!
(Ashes is 50% off. Pew pew!)
Nice! Gonna have to see if any of my friends haven’t picked this up yet and let them know. Especially because Ashes has the most important feature in all of gaming!
Why not the dlc?
Not my department!
Look, I am only makingk ze DLC. How zey are pricing it, I cannot know zis, ja?
e: Hah, that song is amazing, thanks for linking!
Hopefully Brad will stop by and give us some insight. It’s not only Stardock who tends to do this and I’m curious as to why from a business sense…
Just to let you know, I got this reference even without the link. So, paint a cross on your abdo(h)men – when in Rome do like a Roman…
That’s all I’ve wanted.
The first taste is free. ;)
While nearly everyone plays Ashes single player exclusively (like over 90%) we do want to make sure the MP community keeps growing and expanding so we tend to be pretty aggressive in getting players in.
The DLC is pretty beefy in terms of hours of gameplay. It’s one of the nice things about strategy games. That last mission on Drengi is one of my favorites but there’s a Turtle Wars scenario that has consumed more hours of my time than many entire games.
As for games improving after release, definitely true. For me, the key point is whether 1.0 was fun which I think Ashes succeeded in (and Tom deserves a lot of credit for that).
Post-release, you just start to get so many good ideas from the player base that thanks to digital distribution, we don’t have to wait.
For example, with the new units (Eradicator and Athena in particular) there was no original plan for these units until we started to play the game with other people and seeing holes in the strategy.
There is still a ton of things we want to add to Ashes over the next couple of years. But thanks to the player base, I think we have a really solid start.
The biggest mistake in the original release of the game was the campaign for sure. As Tom can tell you, there was no inkling of a campaign until 60 days or so before ship when beta testers began requesting one and we concluded we needed one (we didn’t make one for Sins). So the entire campaign that shipped with it was designed, coded, and implemented in 60 days (including the maps, the cut scenes, the underlying scripting language). The 1.2 update really helped make it a lot more polished.
As for Star Control, it’ll be many months before we’re ready to talk about that. All I can say is that its budget is like OTC + Ashes + GC3 combined. By far the biggest effort we’ve ever done. We’ve got Soren’s team, Oxide’s team and veterns from BHG, Grey Goo, Civ IV, Civ V, GC2, Sins, etc. all working on it.
A little late posting, but the July dev update was posted by Brad. :)
http://steamcommunity.com/app/228880/discussions/1/358416640401552513/
The v1.24 update was released today with observer mode and half-resolution terrains, along with various other fixes and improvements.
Full changelog: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/478611/
[quote]Observer Mode
Check out the action in other player’s games! In multiplayer games, the host can allow players to join as “observers” that can watch the action without actually participating.
Half-Resolution Terrain
This new graphics option reduces the graphics resources used by Ashes. While sacrificing very little in visual quality, enabling this option will greatly improve in-game stability on lower spec machines and on larger maps.[/quote]
I’d like to think both of those changes could go a long way toward making esports more of a thing for Ashes (SupCom did have a pretty bitchin scene for a hot minute there). Pro players in SC2 often play in lower detail for maximum performance (and also because in earlier iterations of the game, models were a little “clearer” or more discernable at the lower settings), and of course observers are more or less a must.
Best of luck, d00dz :-D