Yeah, I never understood why the game required you to click the “form army” button (or press V) instead of just having the units form an army when you control-group them. I mean, Rise of Nations and other RTS games have troops form an orderly group (leader in front, artillery in the back, horses on the flanks) when you select them all.
Edit: perhaps a better comparison would be Supreme Commander, but there too you can have coordinated attacks and formations without forming units deliberately into “armies”, so I dunno. (Not a complaint about Ashes so much, BTW; I sort of default to grouping units together and hitting V.)
Once you have an army formed, you click unit icons to add whatever units you want to add. Doing so causes that unit to be produced at a factory.
Until you have the ‘teleporter’ cruiser in an army – @DarthMasta is right: once a unit is created, it will drive across the map. In my playing, I never liked this method but waited until I could ‘gate’ them instantaneously to my armies.
I understand that, but if you have factories building with their queue set to cycle, does it inject those requests as one-off builds into that cycling queue? That is my question. I haven’t really paid attention. Just wondering if it is worth having dedicated factories set aside for that purpose.
Edit: I usually have a set of factories continually pumping out units, and then when a dreadnought finishes construction I grab them all and create the next army to send off somewhere.
Maybe I’m better at this game than I thought, or you guys are trying to pad my ego :-)
Pretend you have 1 army and 1 idle factory & you tell that army to add 20 Archers: these will queue up on the factory. If you want to make 1 Hermes (maybe to protect your home base) and click build on that same factory, it will get queued up behind those Archers in spot #21.
If you have a number of factories, the game decides which one does the building. I liked this mechanic because late in the game: you have a lot of factories and resources & don’t really care where the new units get built.
Sure, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. You can also tell the factory to build 1 archer, and hit the repeat button, and it will build archers until the game ends. My question is if you request a reinforcement for an army, will the system inject that build request into the endless stream of archers that factory is building.
With the scale of the game, I find it easier to have a set of factories pumping a mix of units continuously to have fodder ready to pair up with dreadnoughts as they come out of production.
This Genesis campaign seems like a step up in difficulty suddenly :/ Maybe I’ve just forgotten how to play the post humans. The first mission keeps kicking my rear.
Finally made it through the campaigns. The first and penultimate missions in Genesis are real doozies.
I liked it overall - I liked the explicit link between map control and resources in particular. The dumb reinforcement problem is a killer though, and even trying to move units between armies to better match source and destination is awful. Later in games I often felt this system was defeating me with its wtf behaviour, rather than anything the enemy was doing…
We are getting ready to release a major v3.0 update on February 4th, which is an overhaul of the game’s balance, with nothing left untouched - this includes units, buildings, orbital abilities, and lots more.
We’re really excited about v3.0 here because of how absolutely massive it is. It brings a new benchmark, performance optimizations, and major improvements to visual effects. New maps, campaign adjustments, and much more are also included.
This update is, quite literally, game changing - if it’s been awhile since you’ve given Ashes a try, now is a great time to take a look at it again. Both game factions have had their units and buildings carefully balanced against each other. Rather than just adjusting hit points and unit cost, v3.0 focuses on giving each unit a unique role to play. The AI has also been updated significantly.
You can learn more about the update on our forums if you like. It’s in beta right now under “opt-in v2.99 Preview” if you don’t want to wait a week for the official release. Enjoy!
Nice, looking forward to this. I loved Ashes on release and devoured the campaign, but I haven’t been back in a while even though I keep it installed on my PC. Sounds like the perfect time to see what has changed since my last play and I am in the mood for some RTS action.
My group played some Ashes a year ago, and we like the game, but it kept crashing in multiplayer. I don’t see anything about crash fixes in the changelogs from the past year. There are many crash reports on Steam and the official forums with zero support happening. If the crashes don’t get fixed, all the massively updated stuff is worthless to us.
Awesome. I have a shiny new GPU that makes this a good time to jump back in - I only did a dozen hours of skirmishes at release as my system had trouble keeping up…
Interesting that this is still being worked on. Too bad we never saw things like new factions and the like, but the RTS genre isn’t exactly booming at the moment so it’s understandable.
