Your First Impressions...

It runs fine for me, had one crash right after launching into a 2nd game, but apart from that nothing really major.

It screws with my head how it uses right click to pan and middle mouse to change the camera angle. Also you can watch the map from below like that

My first impressions were "ehh, seems like a standard TA-ripoff, and the controls are pretty clunky...  Oh well, it's pre-alpha, who cares, I'll just fiddle around for a few minutes, turn it off and come back later."

Except I didn't turn it off, and found myself playing giddily for the next hour and a half, gleefully fighting against the UI (not a typo), searching frantically for hotkeys, and making things explode without even noticing the time going by.

I am a happy little boy.  Well done, my friends.

The victory-point/area-control system is the best part of it.

Totally agree with you on this, the way it works and the points connect in a 'web' is pretty interesting (plus the fact these points can have neutrals on). That part of it totally reminds me of a Company of Heroes / SoaSE hybrid.

Yep, I have also been having issues with this...I think some games seem to have just ingrained in me that middle mouse + drag should move the camera, not change the angle.

It is also worth adding that I like the hotkey design at the moment, I am sure this has been done in games before (I know Grey Goo uses a similar system) but it comes across as pretty intuitive.

This is just an initial view on where some of the features stand, and my opinion at the time. Most of these are not things I expect huge change on. I am simply stating my opinion on the current build so the team can get feedback. All of this is meant as constructive and should not be take as anything but that.

Units

I feel the units themselves are pretty well done. They are varied enough to allow good unit composition, while keeping the gameplay fairly simple. Even at the current build the units looks well done and render nicely. The biggest issue I have found so far is that all the units feel like they are stuck in molasses. By this I mean they move extremely slow. This isn't an issue on smaller maps, but if you get in a huge map it will be excruciating to wait on the units to traverse the area. I don't feel they need a huge buff to speed, but they need something. Scout units do however need a nice speed boost. As a scout they need to be able to explore the map at a decent speed and will use that speed as a way to escape enemy fire. With this in mind it would be good to see them get a healthy boost. 

UI

The UI to me is a love/hate relationship. While I like the overall layout, it does need some refinement. I found the unit boxes on the left overlapped some of the buttons when large forces are made. Overall I feel that the unit layout, information, etc. is pretty well done. It gives you the current information on your forces and allows you the option of quickly selecting anything you need to. I like the resource section as it is right now, and the addition of the victory count is a welcomed one. Most RTS games don't really give you the option to see if you are winning or losing at any given point in the game. The research box is one that I feel could be toggled so that you only see it when needed. So far I like the map and feel that it serves the purpose it was meant to. It's a map, so it is kind of hard to screw up.

The building part of the UI is one area I would like to see some improvement. I like the initial direction, but feel it could be refined to allow quicker selection of buildings, units, etc. I would like to see the bottom bar list Structures, Land units, and Air Units. The next up would list for structures would be Resources, Logistics, Factories, and Defenses. For the Land and Air unit options it would show Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 in the second bar. I am not sure if this would help or hurt the ability to quick build units, but it feels cluttered to me right now.  It would also be useful to the flow of war if we had a button at the bottom of the screen or attached to the map that allowed instant access to our building queues. Having to go back to factories to build takes us away from the battlefield and if we could call up reinforcements while watching the action I feel it would help the game flow.  

The other thing I liked about the building panel is the color of the defensive buildings. I would love to see that theme carried on through each type of building and all the unit tiers. I feel that with the color coordination it gives immediate recognition to the type of building you are going to build and allows new and old players a better understanding of what they are doing. 

Gameplay

So far I have to say that the gameplay is enjoyable. Even with the game being very early stage I find it to be fairly engaging to attack, defend, and counter the enemy units. I am very excited to see how the AI will evolve as the development continues. On top of that, it will be very interesting to see how the multiplayer games go. I think the supply line feature is one of the great additions to this game. Once fully realized I think it will go a long way to changed the tide of battles for smart players. It brings a nice since of depth to a large scale RTS game like this. 

Research/Unit Progression

Right now the research feels kind of bland. you just plop down 3 research buildings and then click unnamed buttons to get cooler stuff. I honestly don't know what I expected from this, but it just doesn't feel like anything special in the game to me. After playing for a while, I feel like the unit progression through the tiers has a good feel to me. It can be easy to jump ahead and build all the research buildings you need, but without the reactives you are stalled. There could be more done to slow the unit progression so that matches require more effort, but that will evolve as the game gets further into development. With the different tiers of units fighting it out I didn't really notice an extremely over powered unit, but I did find artillery kind of useless for the most part. There range could be buffed some, but I would like to play more and see for sure. I do like that the rocket units, artillery, etc aren't 100% accurate all the time. 

Performance

Even on the higher settings I am seeing my performance stay very stable with this build. I'm not seeing anything really killing my frame rate other than zooming out and scrolling across the map. At that point it's kind of expected though. Overall I'd say well done. We will see how future patches and fixes go.

System Specs

AMD Phenom II 1100T
Corsair 16Gb
XFX AMD R9 280X

Game Performance: Near Perfect 

I'm sure... I'm sure they'll change that before release.

Right guys?  RIGHT?  YOU GUYS!??  :D

My first impressions:

It runs ok, but feels a bit clunky (to be expected with the age of my machine).

There needs to be more resolutions defined (like 1920x1200).

Please allow us to remap keys (like panning).

It sucks to have to work instead of playing more.

As we indicated there will be pain and suffering (though didn't expect Steam to contribute!).   More options will be added as we move along in development. We weren't kidding when we called it an Alpha.

Could anyone confirm if Mantle should or should not be working on my AMD 280x?

As I mentioned in my initial post I vaguely remember reading a post on these forums that that it would only work for certain cards to begin with but I can't seem to find where I saw that now.

Just tried my first game.  

There was no choice for 2560 x 1440 resolution, so I had to pick non-native 1920 x 1080.  

The colors seemed very washed out, except for the red particles as the engineer constructed, which looked terrific.

The animation was quite smooth.

After 3-4 minutes, the screen froze.  I could still hear the music playing in the background, but the game was unresponsive.  I brought up task manager.  Whenever I alt-tabbed to it, I just got a white screen.  I finally had to restart the system. 

Windows 8.1 64-bit

Nvidia GTX 680, 2 GB RAM, 353.06 drivers

Intel i-2600 CPU

16 GB RAM

Stuart Pierce

My first impressions about the game are very good.

My settings used were all at hight, the game run smoothly until the and but little slow.

The selection of units is not always active and sometimes do not follow the right path .

The units as expected are still slow, other problems encountered as in the fights ,hit the right target fails a bit.

I think genius map control by right click in the mouse never saw that , but here is some necessary adjustments  some clicks are a bit confusing but not much.

The way we have to control the map is interesting and personally makes me feel a little TA, using engeniers to assist make me happy and the Zoom like i want still needs work but very good.

Already made me realize that the game is going to be bether then i expected and very competitive .

I7 4790k

32gb ddr3 2400

Gtx 970 +gtx 960

Windows 10 build 10130 x64

The UI and other RTS stuff is not only open for discussion but he big difference between an ea program and a founders program. Think of yourselves as part of the dev team now.

I'd love it so eone created a thread just on how wed like to have the mouse and camera controls. Note: we. You guys and us. 

Did you type that on your phone?  ;)

Quoting moltobenny, reply 13

Did you type that on your phone?  

Yes.

Sadly, Mantle doesn't currently work on the 280 presently. 

My first impression is that as of right now this game is mediocre. It seems more like a tech demo of trying to prove how many units and how many projectiles they can display, rather than create a tense, engaging strategic game.

Don't get me wrong, I strongly feel it has immense potential. I love TA and this game seems to be leaning in the right direction, while also trying to build the next generation of RTS instead of just pandering to desperately imitate an old, successful formula.

But as of right now there is no command and control to speak of that wasn't present in 1990, and even some that is missing. The UI and controls feel clunky, the rules of the game aren't that great, and the "strategy" is basically nonexistent.

For example, victory points is a pretty odd feature to put in a game like this. It tends to just run until the game says "You Win!" and that's it. You capture the points it tells you to capture, and eventually you get a dialog window.

I have enormous hopes for this game. But right now it is mediocre at best.

As a game, I'd say it's not even mediocre. It should be terrible.  At this stage, it's basically an RTS engine with basic game mechanics added on. 

As mentioned elsewhere, it shouldn't be fun yet.  

Modding first impressions: https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/467525/page/1/

just downloaded everything, turned everything up to max.  Everything ran rather smooth, had a few zoom problems where it bounced back and forth.  could also see the triangle grid which the terrain overlaid after i drove some units over it.  all builds/units looked great.  i am guessing you going to add a tutorial later on, but I only needed a few minutes to figure it out, but then I have been playng rts games for over 30 years.

running on

windows 7 home premium 64-bit

amd fx-8350 eight core processor

16GB DDR-3

nvidia geforce GTX 750 Ti

direct x 10

My first impressions are really positive as well.

I'm running an i7-4770k with 8gb of ram and a GTX 770 2gb. It ran really smoothly. There were a few hiccups as I scrolled around fast fully zoomed out. As others have stated, to be expected. I am really happy with the performance given that it's early Alpha.

So far, I feel the units move a little too slow. I don't need or want them to move really fast. But increase the speed just a little. Large maps will be painful to move across on land. Again, I don't want them to be really fast, just a bit faster than current speed.

I did have the unit names disappear as well after playing for a bit, I made a point to watch for it since many others have mentioned it.

The research window needs some work in my opinion. The icons don't seem to match what the research is. I wouldn't be able to take a quick look and say, "Oh, that icon is for metal storage." I would only know because I have clicked it before and remembered. I would also like the ability to toggle that window.

I didn't have any graphical issues, the only thing that I was wondering is the scanner grid. Where it's white, it was flashing between the white and blue erratically. I wasn't sure if that's intentional because it's "radar pings". 

Combat. I didn't get into a lot of combat, I only played one game so far so I really only fought the guardians of the capture points and then one kinda large battle just before I won via victory points.

The first thing I want to point out are the bombers. They seem to be very inaccurate and not that powerful. I came across three anti-ground turrets and sent 3 full groups of bombers to take them out. It took 15 minutes of them circling and bombing to kill all three. I was able to micro them and had them be slightly more accurate. I think they need to go a bit further before circling around to attack again as their turning radius makes them miss the line on their target. I do not know if bombers are anti-unit and are weak vs buildings though.

Again, I don't know if this is intentional, but Tier 1 units feel useless vs Tier 2 and Tier 3. Now, I would hope higher tiers would be much better vs lower tiers, but I fought a battle where I was outnumbered at least 3 - 1. I had mainly T3 units and my capital unit. I absolutely demolished them and barely had a scratch after.

All in all, holy piss this game is fun already.

well... im running on windows 10. 
with an i7 4770k  and the r9 280x

I had my trouble running with mantle( I assume thats cause of 1 the game is not optimized and 2. cause windows 10 has shitty drivers)

but once i turned on compatibility mode for windows 8 I at least got the game to start without telling me that my video card is not recognized or whatever it was exactly ^^

I can't say tho that the game ran very stable with mantle, the drivers stop responding occasionally and at some point when we reached T3 the game just crashed. I would direct the fault for that to windows 10 tho, cause I have similiar problems with the drivers not responding in other games.

That being said, my 280x does run mantle on windows 10 with win8 compatibility : does that mean it'll run on windows 8.1? I have no idea =D... but I'm certain it wont be very stable.

the DX11 runs by far more stable and less problematic but i had to turn on windows 8 compatibility as well.

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now to some general feedback towards gameplay. My experience so far has been, that the game progresses slowly, land units seem to move extremely slow.

The effectiveness of units is not very obvious, It has been impossible for me to tell how well the units perform in certain scenarios. I especially have no idea whether the game uses hit boxes or not ( meaning whether shots that seem to miss actually do miss or not).

On first look structuring units seemed rather complicated while z auto arranges units,  I have also yet to whitness a true benefit from the meta unit system , I'll keep on observing and testing

units also seem rather beefy o_O  meaning a 3 vs 3 units fight can take its time... well but they have to be beefy in battles designed for large scale i suppose.

the UI itself is too small for my eyes. i can barely use it cause i can't read it properly or at least it would take a while (I would love a sandbox mode btw)

resources seem a little scarce  whith that i mean through the entire battle one factory constantly working  was enough to completely drain me of metal ( should that really be the case?).

the TlDR:

unit movement may be too slow in large scale battles. battles can be very confusing without you knowing what exactly just happened.  the interaction with meta units  needs to be easier. ( or i just haven't figured it out yet =D)

I can't read the UI properly... give us the opton to make it bigger ( i'll gladly sacrifice some vision )

more resources?  at this rate I definitely won't reach the thousands of units.

Was it blue?  If so, that is programmer art for the radar system.  The actual terrain mesh is extremely fine grained.

Stardock and Oxide, thank you for working hard on a great game idea. I believe Ashes is off to a good start and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

First impressions:

Performance:

• I have had 0 crashes! (yet)
• The game played smooth to me at med to high settings (30 FPS)
• I have maxed out the graphic settings and it dropped frame rate to 20 to 25 FPS
• I couldn't see much (at all really) difference between maxed out everything and just enough turned down to get 30 fps (only a few things turn down)
• Short list of system specs below 

Bugs:

• Minor so far
• The name of many of the units does not show in the bottom left box when a unit is selected
• I'm using Multiplicity and when I move my cursor to the left screen to scroll, it does its multiplicity thing (mouse/keyboard now controlling the other computer) and Ashes just moves to the left until it hits the edge of the map or I move the mouse back to the primary computer (edge locking works on the other side with the 2nd screen of my primary computer)... this is not just Ashes that does this, most games don't play well with Multiplicity
• Large unit bumping - this is funny, but annoying. Two big ships get close to each other and BAM they are flying across the screen.... did we get Eve Online physics here

Game:

• Just a few initial thoughts, will give more after playing more
• Units move very slowly. I expect this out of the big T3 ones, but the small seems to barely be faster (if at all?). If these are small maps, then I'll have plenty of time to go get a drink while marching army's across a large map
• I like the choke points the mountain passes provide, but they are pretty tight for a army of 100+ The units seem to like their personal space (except the T3 ones, they just like to get up close and personal to bump around)
• Meta Units (or whatever they are called now
• I have seen them center around a single T3 unit and that's pretty cool
• Only 1 T3 per meta unit? 
• Thank you for not having individual unit activated abilities. I don't think they would be a good fit for Ashes style or game play. Way too many units to micromanage for activated abilities

Strat Zoom vs Mini Map stuff

First, I know this isn't SupCon:FE, SINS, or other games that use strat zoom. I also know you are going for Ashes to be its own thing and not a clone or SupCon remake. I have read many of the comments about for/against strategic zoom, but have held off commenting until I have played the game. 

I feel its missing. I keep scrolling out so that I can get a quick glance on what is going on before I zoom to mouse location on a different part of the battlefield, but I just can't get the full map in view. I have to pan around via edge scrolling or right click drag and drop. I forgot there was even a mini map. Maybe SupCom has ruined it for me for all other RTS's that have mini maps, I just don't use them. I have only played two full games of Ashes so far. I will try to get myself use to not being able to strat zoom and try to remember there is a mini map.

That's it for now. More as I play more.

System Spec's for reference

i7-4790 @ 4.0 GHz
16 GB RAM
GTX 970 4GB

Prefect -- I liked your formatting so I stole it .  I'm also very impressed with how far along the game is.  It's a testament to how hard you all are working over there and makes me very excited to see where the game is going to end up!

Performance:

• I have not experienced any crashes on the tutorial, easy, or med. levels.
• The game was smooth for me in Mantle even with the setting jacked up as high as they would go.  Slower outside Mantle.
• Short list of system specs below. 

Bugs:

• I noticed the same disappearing unit name issues and large unit bumping as noted in Prefect's post.  
• The title screen does not load correctly in Mantle.
• I also noticed the extra dropdown boxes when playing around when you change the video settings more than once that others have mentioned.
• When zoomed out on the map I can sometimes see lasers, etc. firing in areas that I do not even have radar coverage on.

Game:

• I agree with the general sentiment on slow units -- although I would not increase their speed too much.  Similarly, I felt like the missiles from artillery units moved incredibly slow.  I'd prefer for them to move a little faster but for the missiles themselves to have a longer re-load.
• I also had trouble maneuvering large groups of units through choke points as others have noted.
• Meta unit grouping is very temperamental.  Sometimes I can add more than one T3 unit and other times I cannot.  I have not been able to figure out any rhyme or reason to why it works sometimes but not others.
• The meta units are, well, not very intelligent right now, although I get that this will change.  It's frustrating watching the AI send out anti-air units in front of heavy tanks, face arty units towards a mountain so that all the missiles blow up in their faces, etc.  I also think the capital class arty unit would sit and shoot itself sometimes -- either that or arty was coming from offscreen and hitting it without leaving a smoke trail, I couldn't figure it out.
• Still on the AI bit, I found it frustrating that the assault capital ship would waste it's main weapon on small units vs. waiting for another capital ship to come into view. 
• I found the "area control" or w/e capital ship pretty useless, and ended up defaulting to the assault class one when I saw how slow the arty capital ship's missiles go. 
• I love the buffs you can get from grouping different units together.  Kick ass idea whoever came up with that!
• I would LOVE IT if you could select offensive, balanced, and defensive default formations for the meta units; but I realize that this may not be feasible.
• Some means of automatically sending new units to a particular meta unit would be great so players have one less thing to micromanage each step of.
• I know I'm old fashioned, but I like being able to hit the "H" key and be whisked back to my main base.  Just makes my life a tad bit easier.
• Research is intuitive but lackluster.  It seems tacked on right now which is fine because we're so early in the process.  For what it's worth, I did not get very excited about anything I could research.  Weapon enhancements, speed enhancements, radar extenders, armor enhancements, etc. would all be more exciting to me that what's currently available.
• It would be nice to be able to move things around on the UI and stick things in different places or minimize them altogether.  That may not be doable, but I thought I'd throw it out there.  
• The unit group list/meta unit list on the left is cool, but the images of the units themselves are very large.  Once you make a couple groupings you cannot really see much anymore.
• I had a hard time keeping track of when units were losing hit points and why.  It may be that a lot of shots by enemies just do not connect, but sometimes it seemed like units would last forever, and other times they blinked out of existence very fast.  This made it tough for me to gauge which units were more and less effective.
• The AA unit seems overpowered.  You can build two or three for a large meta group and keep fighters/bombers off you all day long.  On the flipside, the bombers seem underpowered.  The poor bastards drop bomb after bomb but nothing really happens.  
• I could not tell if the mobile repair unit actually does anything.  It did not seem to repair anything -- at least not that I could really notice. 
• The musical score is spot on.  Nice job selecting background music that's comfortable to listen to for hours on end.  The spoken audio could be better at alerting you to units under attack, etc.  Right now you have to rely on seeing things happen rather than being notified about a meta unit being in trouble.
• I like the lack of strategic zoom.  Glancing at the mini-map and assigning meta unites to hot keys works quite well.  I also felt more immersed in the action.
• I like the way you mapped the mouse buttons.  It makes sense to me to change perspective with the mouse wheel.
• Overall pacing seems OK right now.  I felt like I was able to advance through the buildings really fast, though, and get to the highest level units.  That's different than a lot of games and it definitely speeds the action up.  I might like things slowed down a smidge, but that's just my initial impression.

System Specs:

[email protected] (4 Cores)

16GB RAM

Radeon 295x2 8GB

I noticed the same with my scout units. It's interesting because it shows the enemy units in a lighter blue grid allowing you to follow their movements. 

I feel the need to disagree on the dislike of slow units. 

Other RTS games (notably Starcraft and those like it) try to create an "action-packed" game using speedy units and fast-paced battles. Player micromanagement and skill is a huge focus for these types of games.

It is my understanding that Ashes of the Singularity is taking a different approach. With tens of thousands of units on the board, it isn't necessary for an individual unit to be speedy in order for some units to always be engaged with the enemy.

At any given time only some of a player's units will be actively engaged. Others will be repairing, re-arming, driving to reinforce, re-deploying to a different area of the map, and so on. These actions should take time.

The reason they should take time is because at the end of the day, time is the only resource. Any decision that you make can also be unmade given enough time. Such as choosing to deploy an army in one position. If your base is attacked, that army can move to defend given enough time.

But what we are looking for is a strategic game, where player decisions have consequence. If your army is out of position in Starcraft your army can quickly hustle over, and it only takes seconds. In Ashes it should be so time-consuming to do the same that you don't bother.

What this means is you have lots of different locations, which are temporally separate. A base is going to need its own garrison in order to stop an enemy attack- you cannot count on an army in the field being able to run home quickly enough to defend it.