How to do Total Annihilation wrong - Ashes of the Singularity

they didn't even make a good promo video. you would think the video the show on their site would portray the gameplay in the best way possible. but from what i can tell from it it's just hoverfac and gs except projectiles are glowy.

my first reaction the their Game Features list:

ash:

quote: Engage in Massive Sized Games Huge maps can house over a dozen players at once and is perfect for a ‘comp stomp’ or a chaotic free-for-all.

me:
i've seen plenty of 8v8s on autohost

ASH:

quote: Manage your Armies Globally The global view feature lets you use the mouse wheel to zoom out and exercise greater control over your armies. Easily see the entire battlefield and control large groups of units effectively.

ME:
mouse wheel zooms? you kidding me?

ASH:

quote: Battle Across Unique Worlds Wage war across landscapes of massive crystal formations or storm your enemy’s base across spans of volcanic pits and burning terrain.

ME:
remind me how many fetured maps are in zk?
my maps folder contains 778 files.

ASH:

quote: Choose your Gameplay Dynamics Plenty of map options allow for variety and challenge in both single and multiplayer games!

ME:
facepalms

ASH:

quote: Expand your Strategy with Advanced Units Add to the gameplay dynamic with unique units for both the PHC and the Substrate! Battle your enemies with heavily armored units, powerful aircraft, helpful support bots, and more.

ME:
where's the walking nuke, unit yeeter, turn in place test or dirt?

ASH:

quote: Bolster your Defenses Surprise your enemies with unexpected orbital attacks to slow their armies and halt their progress or protect your Nexus by upgrading your defensive structures.

ME:
ah i can porc, i see.



EDIT: so it's $42.95 AUD. a usb stick that costs that much can install ZK, SC:BW, SC2, and 10 other games.

bit impressive you made it through multiple hours.

ps: Get back to coding

I agree, sadly. I got the game on a mega-sale some years ago and I think I played three games of the campaign and a skirmish game. I thought about writing some feedback but did not end up posting it. As with any RTS the game can approximately be split into combat and the economy, and both had deep issues.

The ground units are all floaty, difficult to control, hovercraft. There are at least three tech-levels with a few units each, per faction, and the counters between the units seem heavily dependent on tech-level based armour types. The projectiles in the game may well be physically simulated, but the amount that unit physics affects combat seems even lower than a game like Starcraft. In Starcraft range is important because the units are controllable, in Ashes the units float around and end up mushing together. It is as if every unit is a Locust, but stuck on the ground and much slower.

I remember taking a look at the two mainline (non-scout, AA etc..) tier 1 units of one of the factions. One of them was designated as an anti-heavy while the other was meant to kill tier 1 units. This was done via damage modifiers. The anti-heavy was faster and had more range than the unit that was meant to counter it, however I could not make these stats pay out their implications. I couldn't even do it with a one-on-one unit battle because the units are unresponsive and the longer ranged one could not be prevented from diving into range. The fact that one unit had superior physical stats - range and speed - barely mattered.

The Grand Strategy aspect of the game is realised with the army system. Armies are essentially control groups with extra UI support, such as easy selection and a merged strategic icon. They can also do cool things such as receive rally points (much like autogroups). Overall I found this system to get in the way and give "powerful UI" a bad name. Splitting armies in all the ways you might commonly desire was not fluid, and the armies make combat even less controllable. Combat seemed to boil down to selecting the right armour types and weapon damage modifiers to put in your big ball of health so that your ball comes out on top when you literally mush it into the opponent's ball. Armies can spend 10 seconds rotating and gathering themselves together before responding to an order.

The interface really wants you to use armies. When I ordered a group of constructors to do anything they would automatically form an army, making me have to go through the process of splitting them later.

The economy was barely better. There are two construction resources that both serve the purpose of Metal and are gathered in essentially the same way. There is a technology resource for giving %-boosts and using special abilities that (iirc) is gathered much like Energy. There is a logistics resource because this game has a quite-reachable population limit. There is a lot more to fiddle with, and less control.

Imagine Zero-K but:

• Two types of metal extractor.
• A Company of Heroes-style sector control system that determines where you are allowed to build metal extractors, with about three per sector.
• Neutral creeps defending each of the sectors.
• Multiple ways to spend resource or use special abilities that upgrade the output of individual metal extractors.
• No tools such as priority or area mex. Every single upgrade has to be clicked individually.

Do you upgrade your extractors to adv extractors, make the thing that boosts production in a sector, or spend an ability to permanently boost an extractor? I don't see the interesting choice in this.

quote: I spent far too long with my engineers upgrading resource nodes. I have to zoom in on the point slightly, select the mex/rad structure build option (another overhead) then successfully make 3 or 4 reasonably precise click. Even with hotkeys this can take a few seconds. It takes even longer to upgrade a series of nodes because you often need to switch between placing the mex structure and the rad structure.

I kind of expected the compute shader based simulation to have to be simpler than what we cook our CPU's with, but all of the fails described here aren't even related to that technological decision.

Oh well.

Googlefrog made a good analysis of the game and its flaws , but I need to correct him in a few points :

The army system isn't used by anyone playing competitively and you can set in the option to avoid auto forming an army when you select units and engies.
It was too clunky and it was skipped by anyone except newbies . It wasn't working good , so you basically control units like every rts.

The units now are much faster in turning and speed, they don't need 10 seconds to turn. The general pace of the game has been speeded up .

The resource nodes upgrade comes at very late game eventually , you never boost the income more than once per match . The interesting thing about economy is to decide to fight or not for the special nodes with the ashes symbol. They are heavily defended . Another interesting thing is that nodes have defenses spawning wiht time passing , so it's another strategi decision , if try to rush nodes and become weaker or expand slowly but leaving territory to the enemy.


I know that this game is not everyone's cup of tea , but I fear many have abandoned the game even before scratching the surface of it. I personally like the linear but strategic side of the gameplay.

Unfortunately the all hovering units , two single races with weak story and other stuff discouraged many. Devs always said that they spent a lot of resources building the brand new engine and seems like they were forced to cut here in there.

I played a little bit of Ashes, gave up quickly due to a mixture of disappointment and the fact that it made my feeble computer cry.

There are a lot of little nitpicks to be made about the game, but its core flaw is a lack of unit/battle variety. The game abstracts too much, you throw a blob of units against another blob of units. I imagine that army composition matters, but its not implemented in a manner that makes it interesting.

It somewhat reminds me of Sins of a Solar Empire in that way, which is another 4X/RTS hybrid that I didn't enjoy because battles felt boring and unit variety underwhelming. Although Sins also had the problem of having a really slow buildup, which further compounded the boredom of the battles.

The one thing I think Ashes did right was the multi-front warfare aspect. Ashes succeeds in providing the player with reasons for having multiple armies and having them operate in different frontlines across the map. Whereas in most other TA-like games nearly all of the action tends to be concentrated in one central location, except when flanking attacks happen.

Successfully spreading the action across many frontlines really drives home that "huge war, lots of things are happening" feel. Its too bad the game this huge war is happening on is so boring.

I agree BLISS. My point was that if you play it and expect something like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander, you will be disappointed. I would even go so far as to say it is a decent RTS if you are a beginner to the RTS genre and it might even be a good introduction to games like Zero-K and Supreme Commander, as it has a streaming economy and focuses on escalation of economy and armies, and constant expansion.