Very first impression: the opening music is awesome!

Runs fine for me using a Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 280 OC 3GB

I must confess, I am surprised to hear it's running so well. You guys must have beastly powerful pc rigs. Wait until dirextX 12 shows up. it gets much smoother yet.

Have to say I am impressed 

Overall apearance is good, reminds me of Supreme Commander which I still play weekly! Preformace wise it ran well considering I am using an A10-7850 APU only slowed down a bit near the end of the game and there were alot of units...

I am wondering if it will be all hover units? Would love to see some more traditional tracked tanks ..... Just my personal preference. 

Windows 10 Build 10130
AMD A10-7850
24gb ddr3 2400
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 280 OC 3GB

Great feedback so far, guys!  Thanks!

Was surprisingly stable through several games last night. Granted, I had to turn most settings to low or completely off, but I maintained a steady ~20fps all night.

Win7 SP1
AMD FX-6350
16gb RAM
1gb Radeon HD6850

First MP impression: There was not much MP.

After roughly 20 minutes of defeating creeps our ground units first started to fire at each other. Maybe 5 minutes later the game had ended because I happend to have one more victory points tower since quite a while.

We played the biggest map.

To summarize:

- Units are waaaay too slow and take forever to reach your opponent.

- Creeps slow you down even more

- With victory points the game can easily end before you even meet your real opponent, it becomes a pure "who is better at bashing creeps"-game.

Random thoughts:
- increase unit speeds.

- reduce creep numbers

- specialize some units to be effective fast raiding units. Like a unit type that allows you to raid your opponent before minute 5.

Huge yes to this, although this could be fixed with adjustable victory conditions, which I assume the end product will have.

Hey id like to start by saying that the game runs good on low to medium graphical settings on my laptop nvidia 860m, iam quite happy about that

I still think its early to tell but from playing a couple games, there is some feedback i would like to give:

1- I wish i could force attack units inside squads, most of the times units are in range but since the overall squad isn't my units won't attack, and sometimes units themselves get seperated from their squad making engagements hard to control.

2- I would like that arty and missile skirmishers could force attack ground positions giving more micro potencial.

3- I dislike that i cannot move air units into mountains with right click.

4- Bombers drop their bombs in odd places, i wish i could force attack ground with them.

5- (Edit: i just discovered Alt but still...)There is some lack of Ui in terms of knowing if a unit is reloading or if its in range.

6- (Personal preference) tier 1 units and constructors move too slow, if you think the speed is correct at least differentiate more between harass and kite units like missile skirmishers versus close range units, and tier 1-2 versus capital ships.

7- Units bug out and move clip inside each other very oftne

8- Units also miss a lot making things like scouts more efficient than brutes early game.

Overall i liked the game i think it has a lot of potencial.

So far so good, basically it is similar in a way to SC Games, obviously graphics and FOW is not properly rendering, but that's all cosmetic.

FPS At the moment feel playable but not great.

The unit movement response feels sluggish?It is not smooth and the unit AI might need a bit of adjustment perhaps, but I only played 2 games so its to soon to feel the game out.

I like the research idea, capture and you pick what you want to research first etc...

ZOC is a good idea, but are the zones small because its test maps or is it a limitation?

I would like to see zones be bigger by x4 at the very least, otherwise it feels like RISK more than anything else.

I am also not used to using WASD for moving around the map so arrows are usable but not natural for me.

I am running Mantle Version as I have the R9 290.

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.5GHz
             Memory: 32768MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 32706MB RAM
         
    

First Impression (just 10 minutes, because I have to leave  again): 

Damn, it feels like Strike Commander the first 10 minutes (my favorite RTS).   Can I change the game speed? 

It load long in the background, but the first 10 minutes no problems: 

Windows 8.1 (not mantle)
AMD FX 8350
AMD Radeon  HD 7850
RAM: 16 GB

I'll give you my impressions

Overall: The Control points idea flows well, combat really feels like Sins of a solar empire but with a Supreme Commander Twist. Music is good. Not too much micro. Units are epic and look epic.

What I thought was cool: -Love the base defense, very SoSE ish, powerful enough to do damage, but will not hold off the enemy by itself. - I think the drone army concept is cool, would like to see it expand - like offensive drones and such.
-I like the size of the maps, would love to see even larger ones! -Air combat is cool, I like the squadrons of fighter jets.

What needs work (I'm sure they already know most of this):

-I wish I could zoom in more, sometimes I want to zoom-in and get more of the detail of the units. -Animations of structures are pretty weak, would like some spinning radar tower type deals for sensors, maybe a bit less static overall for the buildings. Unit creation animation seems weird. -Engineer aesthetic is identifiable but awkward, seems a little top heavy even accounting for sci-fi technology. -Research seems like it will need an overhaul, but I think that was noted as not finished. -Terrain textures need to be boosted, right now they are blurry on ultra everything. -Missing FX and what not but I'm sure that will come. -Need some more UI work as far information on what structures are consuming. -Wish I could do some more micro, micro the Capital ship away from focus fire without it turning its back on everyone, I mean its a hover ship, it should be able to float backwards on command.. -Tech 2 seems to come too fast, but I do like that there isn't a Tech 2 research or Tech 2 factory, makes it less OP if you tech quick

Yes Fragboy the game its already a good wast time play it ,but if i like at this stage that showld be horrible ,and with lot probles that have to be there ,what will i think about it  at the and

Daam your team , will ruin my life i will probably play this a lot 

After putting in 5 hours of game time into the single player I feel I can give it a decent first impression. Just so you know where my thoughts come from I am a huge fan of TA and SupCom and consider them the best RTSs ever made. System specs will be at bottom. At first I thought mantle was a windows 10 only thing so my first 5 games were without it, then i figured I'd try to use mantle and it worked better than without. Some of the things I mention will be pretty obvious, but being a programmer myself, I would rather be told of a bug I already know about than it slip through the cracks because no one ever told me about it.

Pros:

• I like the grouping system and how units will arrange themselves, act intelligently in combat, and the buffs based on group composition.
• Graphics are pretty good maxed out with mantle. Great FPS as long as you don't use any radar.
• I enjoyed the music even though it was weird having peaceful music in the middle of a massive battle.
• Battles take longer to play out than in most other RTSs, this allows you to manage multiple fights at once and you don't have to micro-manage the fights.
• Multiple weapon systems on many units. It looks great.

Cons:

• Units move a bit too slowly. Yes, I like that the battles take longer to play out, but on the large map it takes a very long time for a tier 3 unit to go from point A to point B. When your power is capped out and you can't self-destruct or remove a building to get its power back then you can't build a factory closer to the fight. I'd suggest a 20% speed boost and see how it changes things.
• AI is a free win at this point. On the small and medium map i win before i even see the other player. On the large map the AI bunches up in the middle so it is easy just to go around its main force. I read that it is a placeholder AI right now so I'm sure this will get improved.
• All of the land units (minus the engineer) can hover, yet they can not hover backwards. When my force collides with another force I have to either win or die. You can't really retreat while firing because your hover tanks have to turn around and get shot in the back while running. If the AI follows you it will kill you since it is not being fired upon at all.
• The Tier 1 and Tier 2 units all look fairly similar. I still have a hard time telling most the tier 1 units apart.

Bugs:

Without Mantle running:

• Using any kind of radar pops up the blue grid which absolutely tanks my FPS. I just stopped using it altogether.
• Unit hit boxes seem to be larger than with mantle on (could be my imagination) shots were impacting a noticeable distance from the unit graphic.

With Mantle:

• Half of my structures lit up like a Christmas tree halfway through a match.
• Some structures turned black.
• My Metal and Reactives became -1.$ and I could instantly build any unit / building i had the logistic / power for.
• Picture containing above 3 problems at once http://postimg.org/image/khf0bzldj/
• I could not group some of the tier 3 units I created with anything else.

In General:

• The large rocket explosions look a little excessive and out of place.
• tier 3 unit collisions cause them to bounce around when close to each other. They also bounce shortly before they blow up if near another tier 3.
• Sometimes it takes a while of sitting next to a capture point with the red lines going to the point before i start capturing it. This could be due to neutral units being near the point. If that is the case then the lines should not show up until I actually start capping it.
• Zeus middle laser canon beam waving around like the wacky waving inflatable arm guy is amusing but looks very off. If it is meant to be a chain lightning attack then making it look like a lightning bolt hitting the first target then forking to the others may look a bit better.
• Apollo laser looks very out of place. perhaps if it was larger at the base and thinner at point of impact it may look better.
• Units often fire at enemy targets that are not visible and not detected by radar (i stopped using radar completely after second game).
• Weapon fire can be seen even when in the fog of war.
• The sounds that the repair drones make sounds as if I'm under attack. Whenever they start repairing i look around the map to see where I'm being shot at.
• Speaking of repair drones... I have had repair drones stay in the air repairing my units even after the drone building was destroyed. Not sure if that is intentional.
• Unit names do not always appear in the bottom left.
• When you have a very large number of units the left side of the screen is filled up and you can no longer select the button to assign a group. Yes, I know I can press "z".
• the scout plane has a laser, I've seen it use the laser, but the laser does 0 damage. I had an engineer next to a repair drone building while it was being shot by the scout plane and the repair drones never did any repairing. I've also used a scout plane on an enemy unit and the unit's health never moved.

Wishlist:

• Be able to reclaim or self destruct buildings. Since Power is limited I need to be able to adjust where my buildings are as the game progresses on a large map.
• Unit wreckage similar to that of TA (has to be destroyed / reclaimed or it becomes an obstacle for weapon fire or blocks your units completely.). At the very least there needs to be some kind of wreckage even if it doesn't block anything. This will encourage engineers to follow the forward pushes to reclaim resources.
• Planes crashing into the ground or being obliterated in the sky. bonus points if crashed planes damage ground objects.
• A way to replenish the groups of 3 units back to 3 units if one or two get destroyed. Perhaps a new building type where the unit can go to be reassembled or just sent to a factory to be replenished.
• Anti-Missile defense system to shoot down some of the many missiles that are flying everywhere.
• If a unit is at full health and groups with a unit that increases its max health, then it should be fully healed without being repaired. It should ONLY be doable if all involved units are already at full HP otherwise it can be exploited. As it is I have to sit next to a repair drone building for a few minutes after doing my grouping so that all the new buffed health can be repaired.
• Greater diversity of units. Throw some K-Bots in there.
• The creep spawners spawn creeps before they are claimed and if you take a spawner from the AI but don't capture it all the way it will start spawning creeps again. I think more can be done with this such as it spawns creeps for you that either patrol their zone or go down a random "lane". Units created in this fashion should not be controllable.

Overall great job so far. I likely won't test it again until a patch comes out as the AI is an easy win. There were no multiplayer lobbies open and when I hosted a game no one joined. Keep up the good work.

Specs:

Windows 7 64-bit

i5-2500k 3.3Ghz

Sapphire Radeon R9 290x 4GB

8GB RAM

WD Caviar Black SATA III HDD

1920x1080 Resolution

might have been blue. it definitely was there though

Thanks for the great feedback!  I'll post more when I have time.  Two quick notes:

1) We discovered the bug in the current placeholder AI that we expect to patch early this week.  It will put up a much more significant challenge and stop the bunching in the center of the map.

2) try using CTRL click to give attack moves... this should allow your units to keep firing during a retreat

Thanks for the feedback, can you post what driver you are running?  If it's older, have you tried latest?

Played it for a few hours. Only crashed once for me, so not too bad for an Alpha build. Since I have played other RTS's, I was able to catch on to most things without a tutorial. The gameplay was good, and I think that this will be a really fun game - heck with even just the Alpha I ended up playing perhaps a tad too late into the night. I also loved the resource approach – it is very different from other games, but I totally like it. Nice and fresh.

But, one of Stardock's explicit purposes of the Alpha is to get feedback on their product while it is still very maliable, so here are things that I would like to see implemented into the game that would make it a whole lot smoother (at least for me - a novice to Ashes). Don't take my list as a dislike of the game - I do rather like it - rather it is what would be awesome to see as the game matures.

What I would like to see improved:

-More visual differentiation on the units (esp tier 1). With most other RTS games, you can very easily visually tell units apart even within a race. The tier 1 look very similar when grouped together in a big clump, but they have very different battle functions. So a "form follows function" visual design approach that led to greater differences in the appearance.
-I couldn't find a "save game" button (maybe this just has not yet been designed in yet)

-Resolution & GPU support, and UI scaling. Currently you have a minimum specified 1920x1080 resolution. Now, I have several 1280x1024 monitors hooked up to my computer (7770 AMD cards). The good news: even with both below the min, the game functioned, and I did not notice any big FPS drops -- I was also playing on a small map. The funky thing was that with my low resolution monitor, the player's UI was overlapping itself. I realize that this is not to be totally unexpected as I am below min requirements -- I get an accept that -- but it would be nice in the future to offer support down to the 1280x10254 and 1440x720 monitors so that more people can play the game. (I will be upgrading straight to 4K within the year once the cards & esp monitors are a bit more mature, just not quite yet; in the meantime lower resolution support would be great)

-HP of units is bit hard to determine w/o selection of the units sometimes. Even then it can be a tad tricky. This could be more explicitly displayed (ie, for Blizzard games I think you hold down the Alt key)

-Unit Command Groups. I like that you can assign them to smart units. Totally cool. However, it would be nice to assign them to numbers/some other system so that I could easily re-select them with a single button and/or click. If this was in there, I could not immediately find it.

-BattleGroup's AI. So sometimes I wanted a battle group to go out and conquer more territory. But I wanted to add newly trained units to the group. So, I add them (which is a bit of a pain – see above), and then command the old & new units to go to a location. Sometimes some of the units in my forward party would start going back to try to join up with the newly trained units. No! Don't do that. Once the new units arrive/are very close, then re-do your formation – sure. I think a potential fix to this would be a proximity feature in the battle group's AI; ie if a ranged unit is very far away from a close range unit (even if the ranged unit is under direct attack), then don't try and meet up with the ranged unit.

-Movement speed. It was a bit slow. Now, I do see value to this as it will slow down some battles and allow some better player control. But when 2-3 units train in the time that it takes for them to go across my screen (and I have a small screen), you know that there is an unbalance timing. You don't have to make them super fast, but just a bit faster would be nice. (btw, I like the quick training time of the low level units – that was nice)

-Selecting of units. When units are close together, it can be hard to select one without the other. Once I had a factory between two other buildings air units & research), and I could NOT select the factory to be able to train more units. So I had to build another one.

-Clearly indicate why units cannot be trained (sometimes I thought that I had all necessary requirements, but the box was grayed out. sad day. )

-Hotkeys are not readily apparent (move & attack, move only ,attack, build, etc). They might be in there somewhere, but without looking I did not notice them -- I even tried some common ones like "A" and "M".

-Rally points. When I click on a building, I would like to see where the current rally point. This should also show up on my mini-map in addition to the ground (in case it is half way across the map). Also, I am not sure if this game allows you to rally newly trained units to existing units in the battlefield – that would be nice.

-Mini-map. I feel as if more things should show up on the mini-map. I don;t have more details of this at the moment.

-Food/Logistics cap. For the small/starter map, this seemed to be a 100 – or perhaps I was doing something wrong. Hopefully for bigger games, this will increase by a TON – this could result is some truly epic battles.


But again, overall I really like the game, and even in the slightly buggy Alpha stage it is still fun to play. Good job dev team! I can't wait to see the finished product!

Sys Spec's (yes, at the moment, I am below the "minimum":

FX-6300

32 GB RAM

2 x AMD 7770 GPU

5 x 1280x1024 monitors (only one active during the game).

I am using the latest non-beta drivers: 14.12. I see there is a beta driver 15.5 that I can try. Once I try the newest driver I will reply with my results.

hmm my first impressions, it ran very smooth i quickly bumped everything up to high, bearing in mind my machine its fairly old being one of the original I7 cpus, 12gb ram and a GTX 680. so im pleasantly surprised as it will only get faster i would guess, saves me some cash shelling out for a new rig haha.

i had one crash when i was clicking some research buttons but other than that each game played ok apart from when i tabbed to desktop it didn't resize back to full screen properly.  

the game play, i can see what your trying to do it could be fast and encourage players to chase around for land rather than turtle but and bearing in mind im newbie level skill in this game i found it all very slow, mostly moving units but also in that i had loads of resources but just couldnt get the units out or quickly select them all when i did get a small bunch.  I would always need to build logistics buildings so it seems like instead of spamming energy buildings like in supcom im going to be spamming logistics buildings.  which seems weird considering the games meant to be "massive scale" that i was rolling around with 20 units very slowly.

with regards the controls and ui, when the battle group work ie sent units to the front and auto grouped them it was good , not good when i go to my factory and see a bunch just loitering.  and moving around feels cumbersome and again slow.  i know its early but i didnt like the map, it showed me nothing of what was going on, and i never ended up using it to quickly move around the map i just used arrow keys so i ended up with zero "info" of what was going on in the grand scheme, which made it a bit frustrating as i started expanding accross the map, ultimately slowing me down.  if you zoom out the units and buildings look bad / you cant see them and what things are so i spent a lot of time zoomed in to be able to tell units apart.  

The general look also looked a bit basic, its just something about the buildings there was just no depth of character to them, and i really dont like that different units look almost identical, its pretty hard to tell the composition of your force.

Just some initial impressions but i will have some more goes to rule out newbie failings.

Haven't had a single crash yet so the game has already exceeded my expectations.

I am having an issue getting things that I see in other posts to work like view angle.  Probably a local issue but without a command list I don't have a starting point to test some of these.

The adjust option button in the pause menu is not available to me while in game.

Air units are tough to control, especially the air to air unit.  Had an issue where I was able to put them in a meta-unit and they took off zooming around the whole map until they were all shot down.

Around the edges of the mountains, I am able to attempt to place buildings in the half-spaces there.  The engineer goes to the area before the order is cancelled.

I hope there are plans for wide open maps!  Also, how about being able to specify formations in the meta-unit?

I know I'm not supposed to be having fun yet, but even the alpha shows promise. 

_________________________________________________________________________

System

i5-3470 3.2 ghz

Windows 7 64 bit

10 MB Ram (I know....)

GTX 650 ti

1920x1080

Scotttaysom...

You can see the HP of selected units by holding alt. it also shows circles around the units which i believe are the weapon ranges.

As far as units falling back to regroup with newly acquired units... tier 1 units latch onto tier 2 and tier 2 units latch onto tier 3. so if your tier 1 units are at your forward area and you group them with a tier 2 back at your base then they will move to the tier 2 and the same applies for tier 2 onto tier 3.

Cbray...

Good to know. I will try the ctrl attack tonight.

couple more bugs i forgot to mention...

If you have no metal at all then you can not order that a building or unit can be built until you have at least 1 metal in reserve.

Buffs apply from across the map. I can have a group of Zeus sitting at my base and multiple forward attack groups. Whichever forward group engages the enemy i can group them with my Zeus on the other side of the map and the group gets all the buffs from them. A very competitive player could do a lot of group flipping so that whichever units are in combat are grouped with everything on the map that will fit into that group for the buffs. You need a range restriction on the buffs. Large enough so that all units can maneuver comfortably within the group, but does not allow exploiting.

Other...

Zeus moves forward at the same speed a Hyperion moves backwards. a close range tier 2 should be able to catch a long range tier 3. AI is very good at firing while running away then following my units when i decide to disengage because i can't reach them.

In group on group combat Zeus units tend to rush past other units to attack the tier 3 in back. All other units seem to spread out their attacks and focus on the front line first. Kind of odd that my Zeus run past their Zeus and it comes down to which group has more Zeus to take down the tier 3.

I concur with almost everything in AoWFever's post, except... 

 1. I had one DX11 crash.

 2. I have had the middle mouse angle button not work.

 3. I have had the mouse/camera lock on to units, don't know if I accidentally hit a hot key for that, it eventually went back to norma                                            

 4. 

Wait, middle mouse is supposed to control angle as well as rotation? Because it never has for me.