Game is on the right way

So was Planetary Annihilation. :^)

!spoiler! Seriously though, the game has far from the successful finish line. A game that is simply technically impressive and done by a passionate team isn't an assured smash hit that will amass a massive cult following. RTS games simply don't work that way which is probably one of the main reasons why so few actually attempt making them. !/spoiler!

PA its a diferent concept.

Since begin all new what game was going to be.

This game got nothing to do with that.

Hmm

Not really. The truth about RTS is that people lost interest in them because of a big reason, the games got smaller and smaller, the maps, the units quantity, the map size, even you don't see strategy games that often that you build your base. its all about a small number of units in a small map with an objective that's it!

so 90% of the RTS games got......more Tactical! for me that's really sad, i remember the first C&C, it was awesome. then came TA! omg that was the real and awesome RTS game, i think every company out there should take C&C and TA as an example and make games like them but better.

I recommend you guys to check this link. its really cool

http://www.pcgamesn.com/ashes-of-the-singularity/ashes-of-the-singularity-is-an-rts-where-getting-across-the-largest-map-takes-an-hour

Thanks for sharing that link. I find "Ashes will contain around 12 or 14 units per faction"  rather on the low side for a game like this. I know it goes on to say, "these units will all be unique" but that doesn't mean it is enough. Yes, it can be argued that many players in games with more unit choice will still tend to choose the same few but for the sheer joy of variety and and the joy of expanding up and out on the tech tree could be lost with so few, especially on the longer games.

No navy, so for air you might hope for 3-4 types, fighter, bomber, gunship and perhaps transport ship, though it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't do them as they are hard to do. So that leave 8 - 10 land, not many. I am guessing there will be no units involved for resource gathering.

I think the only way so few units can work is if you can have different types of the same unit. I.e. a type A gunship might be pure air to ground with 2 rockets while a type B gunship may swap out a rocket and carry an anti-air gun instead. So I don't mean just improving a unit a single way through a tech tree, but to allow multiple types to exist and built separately based on one blue print.

In the founders life time edition information it says "We expect a minimum of 3 expansions and 16 DLC in its lifetime". That is a LOT of DLC, I suggest if you are thinking of doing DLC of a couple of units here and there you have a re-think, it will likely piss off your players and give you a bad reputation. Just 2-3 old school/proper expansion packs sounds much better.

So far there is no game we can play, so all we have is a few infos on a game that is being made that make us think of the game we want. Once there is a game for us to play we'll quickly realize just how far apart from each other our ideas of that game are. That's the real reason why most RTS are rather small: The people who play them are split apart by "what" they actually want. The only group that is really big atm is the group that likes games with rather small unit counts and lots of micro. They play Starcraft 2.

That being said, I do hope Ashes will be a good game.

What about Planetary Annihilation, then? What about all the Total Annihilation-inspired games that came before it and fell flat on their faces just like it has now?

If it were as simple as taking an old game and squaring all the values there would still be many RTS games out there, but there aren't.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's bad to expand on this front as I'm excited for this game as well as the likes of Act of Agression, for example (40 players on a map). It's just I don't think you really struck the nail on the head when it comes to this issue.

I'm not yet sure that Ashes is on the right track, assuming that the right track is the 'RTS for the rest of us', whose limit is 10 conscious actions per minute, not 100 or 400. Heavily automated UI is a must, and overall game pace should be slow. Also, most people can do just one task at time, and so even epic scale game should have single focal point at the given moment of time. The key element here is turtling availability - possibility to construct static defenses strong enough that player can focus on the current battlefield without having to worry that anything except full frontal assault can harm his positions. Generally, the game balance should have strong negative loop gain - even if you succeeded in pushing frontline once, next step towards victory should be harder, not easier. Ashes is not yet known to fully satisfy any of that points.

I don't think it is actually possible to build a decent RTS that is playable with 10 apm. Well playable, but dont expect to win against somebody who does 100 apm. Well more precise: You ofc can win, but if you are exactly the same skill level apart from the speed you execute what you want to do, you'll be at a disadvantage.

Why? Because if the game is played in real time the speed at which players react does matter. The only way to change that is to drastically slow down the game speed. So much that it becomes... weird. You need turn based strategy games for that to look fine.

Or do we know any RTS that is "low apm friendly"? Even in SupCom people actually need to be somewhat fast.

I personally also don't want a single focal point. That makes the game rather not so epic to me.

I am very doubtful all the "player speed won't matter, strategy will" will work out. It never does in RTS. It is fundamentally flawed to claim that. Not because I think a game that were to achieve that is bad, but because I think playing a game in real time generally yields you some requirements to playerspeed and additionally I think the definition of "strategy" and what it really means in this context isn't very clear.

We'll see where Oxide arrive at. I won't mind either way. If they manage to make a game where the speed of players does not matter a lot, but something we will call "strategy" does and have the game be fun then I am fine with that. If they come down to what all other RTS have come down to, I am fine with that as well. 

This is a very good line, and then the following conversation proved it I agree 10 APM is very slow and unless units etc. move very slowly or everything is automated it is  unlikely someone can be that slow and be great at an rts. Turn based games may be better for that person, or just vs. AI. It is a hard one to balance and not everyone is going to be happy whatever the pacing may be. Should know much of this in just a few months though.

PA is an OK game for me, I spent $350 on PA from Kickstarter, when i heard about PA i was really happy, i fell in love with the trailer and the info they gave us about the game and how it was gonna be, they got my money instantly, i said it was gonna be TA in a bigger level and so many people went crazy about it.
After i started playing the alpha, then beta, then Final release....(Damn that final Release sucked so much) it was a very incomplete game. so much promise and they delivered around 70% maybe less.

I started getting less interested in it for many reasons, the Units suck! there is no originality on them, everything is the same, path-finding was bad, there is so many bugs and problems with it. well anyway i loved PA and still play it once in a while, PA for me its not as epic as it was supposed to be.

Total Annihilation-inspired games, hmm you mean SupCom 1&2? i played them and i like them they are fun games and they did well with the community. still there is something missing with those games maybe the UI of those games or who knows.

Look what happened with C&C for me it was the best RTS game ever made, the single player story, the multilayer was great everything but every time they made a new one they destroyed it by making it worst and worst until they made C&C Generals and for me it was a damn awesome game. So yes they is some really good RTS games out there, when you stop supporting a game you loose it and no one will keep playing it. I hate EA for that Damn them for Buying Westwood, and damn the Company who got Cavedog but thats life and we need to deal with it and wait for a new developer to give us an RTS game that will make us happy again and i hope that Stardock/Oxide will deliver and support it for at least 3-5 years, look at Sins, I still love that game so much and its because they did supported the game for so many years and gave the community so much till now but that's fine because they did the job.

Act of Aggression is a great game but again its a different kind of RTS, you don't build at all, you just get points and then summon your units. i am talking about games like C&C, TA, SupCom, they are in a Different Category and they Compare AOTS to TA, SINS, and COH, thats why i said what i said about RTS Games.

The only thing that we need to do now is wait for the Alpha and try it out, i am sure Stardock/Oxide will love to get our opinion of the game to make it better.

I can think of a number of things people will like about Ashes of the Singularity and things they won't like.  It will definitely not be "all things to all people".

Reasons people WILL NOT like it:

1. APM isn't a really a focus. So if you're a Starcraft fan who really likes to micro units around, you won't like that. In fact, in terms of control groups, a unit may not belong to multiple control groups (ala 1 for my whole army, 2 for my ranged units, 3 for me melee, 4 for my casters, etc.).
2. On the other hand, if you like Sins, we don't plan to have special abilities auto-cast. If you're not paying attention to your units, they'll do their best but they don't EMP heal, or rush or whatever a group of units magically. You have to command them.
3. It's not about how fast you can crank out stuff. We don't want the game to be about building 30 factories and cranking out stuff. Units tend to llive awhile in battle. So walking into an "ambush" doesn't mean your entire army will be gone in seconds. You can retreat (though with causalities).
4. It won't lend itself to an esport in all likelyhood.  There's a lot of "soft" mechanics. Units can miss (for instance). Some units are better than others at attacking different things as opposed to some units simply cannot attack.  It's more like TA in that sense. 
5. If you have a low-end machine, this game won't be for you.  You will need, at minimum IMO, 8 GB of RAM and 4 cores to play and a DirectX 11 class video card. 
6. We do not plan to have strategic zoom in this game.  That is, if you zoom out, we don't plan to turn the units into icons.  We will allow for zooming out a long way, we just don't want to encourage players to zoom out to seeing icons. There will be a mini map and ideally, multi monitor support (no promises on that depends on time/budget).
7. Terrain matters. This gets back to fuzzyness.  Ashes has a lot of simulation going on (again, kind of like the original Total Annihilation).  That means you will have hills and peeks where your direct fire units won't be able to hit the units behind.
8. There are only TWO different races in the base game.  It's Post-Humans vs. Substrate.  A lot of people really like that third race.  
9. It takes place only on a planet. There is no space component.
10. The base game has no water units. No naval combat. We want to add that in a future expansion but the base game is a land/air war.

So there's 10 things you might not like.

Lots of things to like in there too

1) I am glad APM is not a focus

2) Fine by me   

3) Love that the units are relatively tough, was a strong point in TA and a weak point in PA (for me).          

4) Fine by me

5) I am glad you are using the hardware available, I want the game to look good! The majority of gamers have 8GB of RAM and 4 cores and the game still has close to a year to come out so that percentage is likely to be even higher by then. I suggest you still list 4GB, perhaps 6GB as the minimum though otherwise people will say it is badly optimised, even when it isn't. (I find that sort of thing frustrating!) 

6) I am glad we will be able to zoom out a long way, it is fun to jump around a map like that and swoop in where you want.

7) Terrain mattering is a big plus for a strategy game!

8) My favourite RTS memories are playing TA and WarCraft 2 and they only had two races. If a third was added in an expansion that would be welcome by many though.

9) Fine by me

10) I would like navy in the game, I hope the game sells well enough to get it.

Thanks for taking the time that you do in the forums, most appreciated.

I don't think it's a good idea to force people to play up close artificially by arbitrarily making it hard to manage things far away. It will be noticed by players, and I expect you'll immediately get people calling for icons once you release the game (or modding them in if possible, for an advantage). From the sounds of things, the unit and game design itself discourages playing from far away; icons would therefore just be a quick aid to seeing thing while zoomed out, as opposed to a replacement for zooming in.

Using the UI as a tool to directly change/limit the gameplay seems like it would simply be frustrating to players, and also gives the impression of a missing feature.

#1 and #2 in my eyes conflict. Activiating special abilities by hand screams "APM" at me.

#6 is a mistake that you'll realize when people scream at you once the SupCom players have a look at the playable version of the game.

Or once they mod it away, if you provide the APIs to mod it away via a UI mod then everyone is just gonna use that mod because a strategic zoom grants massive advantage to a player. I am eagerly awaiting the game, it sounds interesting. I am also really into modding and I'll definitely into looking this, pretty sure it will be among the first things I do once I get any form of ashes build into my hands. If you provide any decent UI modding capabilities there _will_ be a strategic zoom at least in my ashes :p

Just to explain how much I love icons: I play SupCom as well as PA with the option to always render them on, because even on low zoom levels icons are so much easier to understand. No 3d models would be fine by me. No icons? wtf! When I turn of icons in SupCom I go "oh that is how factories look when you turn of the icon. Never noticed" xD

A strategic zoom also removes the need for control groups in most situations. It is easy enough to just zoom out and select all stuff you want to select.

Well I guess that will work even without icons, if you roughly can make out where your stuff is. The missing icons will just make players who know SupCom think "oh this game is missing a feature, how bad". 

I feel you read people complain about SupCom to be a "game of icon wars". While that may not be a baseless complaint removing the icons makes it a "game of I can't really see my stuff".

But yeah I think I made my extreme stance on this clear in the past. We'll see how it turns out. Either I am wrong and it works without icons or the UI modding works and I don't care about what the default game has or I am right but there is no modding. In that case I hope you'll give in and just render a few 2d icons. Else the gamble of preordering the game will be a lost gamble to me. Yeah I am making more drama of this than it probably is in either way, but hey there isn't much else to do right now...

Apart from that I don't see anything bad in that list.

That's cool, I just gonna wait to see and play the game myself. Oxide may do a great Job with AOTS or may not we have to see.
For now you have my support 100%. Go Stardock/Oxide!

No, I'm talking about the dozens of more modern T:A clones that lay dormant on Steam. Neither me nor you can remember a name of single one of them, that's how unsuccessful they are despite fully providing what they've set to accomplish unlike PA.

Are you sure you move do everything in your life with a lag of 6 seconds between each action? Simply say you dislike having to go above and beyond your natural speed of handling things (somewhere in the 30-60 APM range but disguised by the idiocy that is an APM counter that also counts inactive moments of the game).

Besides, too slow a game also turns people off. Just look at Grey Goo and the unanimous response the MP community gave it, the game's too slow for them. 

!spoiler! Just a FYI. Starcraft also has a miss chance. Procs at 30% whenever you fire uphill or at units in cover (trees).!/spoiler!

There are very few TA clones, not dozens. In fact, the entire family of TA-like games is:

• Total Annihilation
• Supreme Commander / Forged Alliance
• Supreme Commander 2 (debatable, due to how much was changed)
• Planetary Annihilation

TA is a sub-genre of RTS. Most RTSs do not qualify as TA-like. They are characterised by the following:

• A single commander unit (game over if this dies, by default)
• Streaming economy
• Simulated projectiles
• Wreckages
• No/Few Magic or Special abilities
• Visible construction of units (They aren't trained and then simply appear)
• No "Food" restrictions/need to build structures to increase pop cap

That's just an arbitrary random chance though, not a miss due to natural simulation of the shot (eg., you shoot at somthing, it moves, therefore the shot misses).

No, there's more. There's much more just like there are more AoE-like games than you could count, not just AoE, AoM and EE series. See: Zero-K, NOTA, Evolution RTS, and many, many more, all of which more or less failed to get any traction besides about 100 hardcore fans. 

The point I'm making is that no one knows about them because they're not successful despite being every bit as massive as Total Annihilation or Planetary Annihilation which was ASADDF's supposedly perfect way of making it big with an RTS.

Zero-k and NOTA and Evolution RTS are direct derivatives of TA - Spring (the engine they were built on) was created originally as a way of porting Total Annihilation to 3D; Zero-K and NOTA were mods of TA on this engine (NOTA literally stands for "Not original TA", and is TA with modified stats and a few more units). I consider Evolution RTS closer to a total conversion rather than a separate game - there's far too much re-use of TA content, as well as directly sharing the same spring engine, for it to be considered a truly separate game.

There really isn't many original games that follow the format; most RTS games, especially the low-budget ones, are modeled of the more popular gameplay of AoE/Starcraft as they are not only vastly more well known (and therefore easier to cash in on by relating to), but generally easier to learn how to play (streaming economies and other TA-specific gameplay aspects can be hard to learn at first).

I'm open to the idea there may be a couple more, but you'll need to point them out  .

Total Annihilation only had a 500 unit cap after patches and expansions, half of it's successor's paltry 1000 units.  Supreme Commander took a beast of a computer to run at release, and ran like crap anyway at the largest settings.  The engine was incapable of delivering the design.  FA and SC2 have about 1500 players in game on steam right now, I'd call that pretty successful for a game that performed like crap at release.  Two sequels and still being played today in numbers.

If the crippled love child of TA and a 3d engine can perform well at the market despite minimal marketing and development compared to what Blizzard does for Starcraft, their success isn't being hindered by the idea of large scale games with low micro.

I am just glad to hear this is not like Planetary Annihilation or to certain extent SupCom 2 in terms of unit construction - i could not stand like everything felt so expendable, from the smallest bot to the large naval battleship. You basically never care about them, it is all about pumping zillion of units of whatever kind to roflstomp the enemies... at least it felt that way from my short experience with the game and watching quite a lot of vids on youtube. 

Now i am not for sure some kind of StarCraft lover or do i like those small scale RTS games in general. i actually like the big-scale games. But there needs to be some focus on units and their control as well. Sins is IMO absolutely ideal in this regard, you can have fairly large fleets, which IMO could be even larger, but the point is, the number of capships is limited and these are therefore precious to the player, not to mention titans, so he wants actually to be engaged in their control and not just dedicate himself toward the macrotasks of increasing economy output or unit production.

Hopefully Ashes will work in similar manner, as its IMO perfect solution.

Ok sorry i guess you misunderstood me, i am gonna explain myself better here, your right by saying that there is hundreds of TA clones out there but nearly all those clones are mods, or community based free games that take them 5 or more years in the making because they are not dedicated 100% of the time on them cause they don't get paid, don't get me wrong here, i think some of them are good games, but i was talking about real companies that have the money to develops games and have the programers, designers, animators working 100% of their time on the games, it may be an indie company or an EA kind of company, big or small, they may release AAA, AA, A game, i don't care... but do you get what i am trying to say?

If you take all the mods out and all the community free games out,how many real TA clones are there? max 5-7? not even.

Do you think 1-3 RTS games per year is enough? look at FPS, you see 30+games released per year and i am not talking out mods or community games, those should add hundreds more.

IMO the lack of not being able to fully zoom out and see the entire map and not having strategic icons will be an artificial cap for making good decisions. If you want people to make good decisions you want to give them as much info as possible, by allowing players to see the entire map they're given all of that, but without icons it will be extremely difficult to distinguish any units. Artificial skill caps or restrictions usually aren't a nice thing to do to players.

Indeed. I am sure there will be people who will ask for players to zoom out and simply manage everything as icons.  But we don't plan to support that. You can zoom out very far and the mini map will have icons on it. 

However, we have to design the game premised on what most people will play as.  We don't want to have an endless community battle where people are arguing against "micro" because they want to play the game zoomed all the way out.  This was one of the issues that played the Supreme Commander team throughout.

Well from a high-level perspective restrictions are necessary to help define the design of a game and encourage fun gameplay. For example, technically fog of war is an artificial restriction. The difference is that it is an accepted and expected restriction. For those who are accustomed to icons being present when zooming out, they will expect this in AotS as well and when they don't see it they will see it as an artificial restriction that hinders gameplay. But for those who are used to games such as StarCraft or Company of Heroes, it may not bother them.

So basically depending on the background of the player some may see it as a problem, others may not, and some may even agree with Frogboy and like the absence of icons. Like with many factors in game design, not everyone will be pleased. And it is difficult to determine the quantity of people that are in favor or against any particular feature because not every player makes their opinion heard. Even if everyone on the forums complained, it may not actually represent the majority opinion of the entire community. For this, I think that an in-game survey system (similar to what Relic implemented with Company of Heroes 2) would be more effective method of obtaining as many opinions as possible.

At the end of the day however, the people who create the game have the final decision whether or not that decision aligns with popular opinion from the community (which can evolve and change over time).