New dev journal today! Ashes Designer Callum McCole analyzes some RTS franchises for examples of successful experiential unit design.
Shoutcast video of a 2v2 from some of our top community players. :)
@Island_Dog or @Brad_Wardell is the benchmark stuff working currently? I have it behave very oddly this week, even after uninstalling and reinstalling the game. One time it ran beautifully on the vulkan interface, and then it was taking forever to start, and running real slow, like maybe 1fps if that. And things like the aircraft flying upside down. It was freaky. It seemed to have a problem no matter which interface I used. Playing an actual skirmish though worked just fine and was running like I’d expect.
I’d have to check but I haven’t heard of any issues like that.
It must have been something with the installation or there is a problem with the drive I had it on. I reinstalled it tonight to another ssd after it wasn’t working again today. The benchmark runs fine now, and looks good on a rtx 2080 @ 4k :).
So I am 3 years late to the party, but Steam gave me a 66% off coupon for this, because I own Sins of a solar empire.
So I end up paying £9.
Happy with that.
Is it any good?
I played the entire campaign and many skirmishes with AI and such in the original Ashes (before Escalation) and loved it. The updates and changes that Escalation brought seemed to have elevated it even higher with things like SupCom level Satellite zoom.
Not everyone is as taken with it. Some issues (that have improved somewhat) is that units lack some personality and could use a touch more differentiating factors to make them stand apart from each other. This isn’t something that bothered me, but all units hover above the ground which was a limitation imposed from some design choices and how the AI pathfinding works.
The strengths are the sheer unit density realized in a high definition 64 bit engine, a very strong AI that doesn’t rely on ‘cheating’ as much as other RTS designs, a focus on massive capital ships that slowly lumber across the map, point defense, orbital strikes, aerial units, etc.
It take some light inspiration from Kohan with regards to forming Army units and not needing to babysit as much. While there are frantic moments this isn’t an APM-heavy game since units move slower than other RTS games and the extremely powerful Capital ships are very slow in reaching their destination so this leans heavier towards the intellectual/tactical planning side of RTS design. You can also pause and issue orders when playing with AI.
Some people may find the presentation and narrative a touch bland (I found it fine) but the gorgeous sci-fi spectacle of battle more than makes up for that. It’s like a Pink Floyd laser light show.
Ashes still does not have custom key bindings.
I enjoyed it a lot, only playing the original campaign and a couple of scenarios prior to the merge. Never tried MP, but it felt like it would be good.
Multiplayer is great vs. the AI for our (shitty) skill level. We play it on our LAN weekends and its awesome that we can play 6vs6 AI which is rare for a RTS.
What level do you play the AI on?
The nice thing is each player can be set individual level. I think last time 4 were normal and 2 were challenging.
I played this a bunch before my elbow surgery (due to RSI… too much mouse work through the years), but haven’t played much. I’m not sure I could find the time, but I’d love to play a cooperative comp stomp.
Say in a couple of weeks?
Escalation just got updated to 2.8
Still waiting to hear about the next game (not Siege of Centauri) that they teased announcing earlier this year.
Holy cow. I never thought they do this, but I am so glad they did. The game desperately needed units scaled up. Fantastic changes.
Those changes sound nice. The game’s presentation never lived up to it’s potential, IMO, and I think this was one reason why. I still am not a fan the look and feel of the UI, but hopefully this makes things a little more visually distinct.
I plan on firing it up and playing a game this afternoon to see how it looks.
Played 90 or so minutes of this tonight, and once again I ended up with me thinking to myself that I would rather be playing Sins of a Solar Empire. So yup…