Movement Speed

I would have to agree with most of what you are saying about the speed affecting a lot of the normal battle tactics used in warfare.

I agree that most of the units need to be sped up. I have only played the small map so far, but the ground units felt sluggish for any type of maneuver. I would also like an option to have units move with the slowest unit so that the bombers don't kill themselves before the ground units get to the fight.

I do not think units should be sped up.

In other RTS games, like Starcraft 2, a core design goal of the game is to create an "action-packed" experience, with frenetic battles, high-skill micromanagement of individual, speedy units, and rapid multitasking of units and production in multiple areas of the map.

Ashes of the Singularity is clearly taking a very different approach, of focusing on the strategic decision-making aspect of the strategy game, rather than having individual units which look flashy when they fight, or which give the player a great opportunity to multiply the effectiveness of their units through micromanagement.

 

Under the Ashes approach, the player is the controller of an entire war machine. That means thousands of units. Which means you really have to take a very different perspective when deciding how units should interact than you would in a smaller-scale game like Starcraft or Company of Heroes. In the small-scale games, units need to be able to traverse the map in a reasonable amount of time because there aren't that many units, and the units that there are need to be able to do several actions in quick succession to create action.

 

If you have literally thousands of units, organized into entire armies, then you have a very different fundamental design. Each individual unit can spend most of its life doing "boring" things like driving or repairing or re-arming. However, the player doesn't need to pay attention to every unit all the time. The player is primarily interested in the subset of units that are being active at any given time. And as units are continuously moving around, some of them are becoming engaged and others are pulling back or being destroyed.

The player is focused on the war, not on any individual unit. Not all of that player's units will be actively engaged at any point in time, but some of them will. Which means there is a flow of units that ensures constant action spread across the front lines, even though each unit is slow.

In a smaller RTS most of the time players think of their entire army as a single combat group. And that group tends to fully engage, or not engage, together. But if you have an entire war machine, the war should look very different to you, since you have quite a lot of combat groups, and most of them are actually not fighting at any given time. This could be in the form of rotating groups out to repair and reinforce, keeping reserve groups or QRF task forces, or groups might just be deploying or relocating in a non-combat situation.

 

The reason why this approach is important is because time is what gives strategic decisions their consequences. A very fast army can quickly relocate to respond to enemy movements, such as a surprise attack on one of your bases. Your decision to deploy that army in its distant position matters less if it can be undone quickly.

What should happen is that the map is large enough, and units slow enough, to make players decide very carefully where they want to deploy their forces. Placing an army far away from a base should mean it is just too far away to help if that base is attacked; unlike Starcraft you can't just hustle all the way back to the base to save it.

Time and distance mean you have separate localities. Such as having bases that are far apart from one another which will each require their own garrison in order to defend against enemy attacks, rather than just relying on the blobbing up the largest possible offensive army, which doubles as your defense because it can speedily go wherever it is needed at the time.

Consider the current maps are supposed to be small maps and there are supposed to be much larger maps.

At the current game pacing it takes 20 minutes before you reach your opponent with a full army (yeah air units can be faster but dont pack a punch at all) on the current small maps.

So if the units are not given a considerable speed up on larger maps you will spent hours claiming empty ground before any armies ever fight.

The units don't all need to be super speedy, but currently they are way too slow. Not all units need to be faster, but there need to be some at least.

I know its not that loong but i have played 4 hours in total so far, and i feel forced to make factories ever closer to the frontline because stuff just takes too loong to get there.

And ColaColin is correct units need to be sped up, especially if they want larger maps.

And i couldnt agree more with this:"The units don't all need to be super speedy, but currently they are way too slow. Not all units need to be faster, but there need to be some at least."

ledarsi its just not for map size or scale reasons its also to give raiding/kiting and basic RTS tactics a chance of being viable.

 "unlike Starcraft you can't just hustle all the way back to the base to save it." -> except buildings die so fast that sometimes you cant hustle back to your base, hence basetrade scenarios are so comon in tournaments.

I would also add that allowing to force target individual units inside a squad or fleet is also a critical feature.

 

 

I will disagree with the notion that the units need to have their movement speed increased.  The developers were very clear that they are going for a more Total Annihilation/Sins of a Solar Empire feel, not a Starcraft II/Command & Conquer feel.  This isn't about how well you can micro-manage your individual units or creating an action-packed high intensity strategy game.  It's about being the general, and giving orders to your thousands and tens of thousands of troops, and letting your strategy earn you your victory (as opposed to mouse clicking skill).

I do feel that a cheap, easily killable recon/scout unit that moved faster than the majority of the units do could be useful, however I felt the pacing to be quite nice and exactly what I was anticipating.

I'll be honest and up front:  I'm not "good" at games like Starcraft II or Command and Conquer.  But I can hold my own in games like Sins of A Solar Empire because the way the game was built is much easier for me to work with.  For others it's harder/boring/whatever floats your boat.  You just have to switch your RTS hats.

To speak directly at Colacolin, have you ever played Sins of a Solar Empire?  A large part of that game is simply building up, expanding, and preparing for inevitable conflict.  Especially on the large or huge sized maps, not even talking about the maps with multiple star systems, a single game could take many hours to finish.

I won't go much further into this post than I have already, as I share the same sentiments as ledarsi.  This is a fundamentally different type of game, and I do hope the developers stick to it instead of giving into the typical RTS norm.  This game will require a different approach.

I agree with you X-Astra that the pacing of the game isnt that bad, you get a couple tier 1 units expand, go into tier 2 make a couple fleets with meta-units expand some more and get capitals.

"They are going for a more Total Annihilation/Sins of a Solar Empire feel, not a Starcraft II/Command & Conquer feel."

Total annihilation more than 60% of the units are fast compared to AOTS, theres units like the flea that are as fast as air units in Command and conquer. There are maps in TA where people played 1v1 that resemble a C&C or starcraft match.

TA has the full spectrum of units from super slow to super fast, but lets leave it that old dog alone.

Sins of a solar empire has i recall it has faster and slower units compared to AOTS theres more differentiation.

The actual movement rate of units is on the fast side for land based attack, IIRC, unit speeds are between 60kph and 150kph, part of the rational for making them hover as wheeled vehicles would look awkward moving that speed off-road.  The T1s are much bigger then a tank, think a super massive construction vehicle.  T3's are very massive things, something akin to an aircraft carrier size.

I caution about making generalizations about unit speed that is not relative to other things in the game. Unit speed is relative to map size. If the maps are too small (as some have argued), then units move too fast or are too big. If we double the map size and double the unit speed, then it's the same thing as making the units half the size they are' but making no movement or map size changes other then making the camera zoom half what it is. So, an alternative approach might be, I think units and buildings are 50% too big.

What I've found, however, (often being on the receiving end of a game designer) with game design, we find that we want competing things. If we make units too fast, then the map feels small, if we let the camera zoom out super far then units feel slow, if we don't let it zoom out far enough, we feel constrained, and so forth. Striking the correct balance is difficult.

I believe that what part of what some players are experiencing is that Ashes, unlike nearly every RTS does not need to drop to icons from a performance standpoint.  These means we have next to no familiarity, as a player, how fast a unit actually moves across a battlefield in reality (and in Ashes, as I say, our units are 2x the speed what you'd expect in real-life).  Most of us haven't been in the army over a battlefield in a helicopter afterall.

That point again. That was already said in that AMD presentation "You zoom out and units do not become icons, that is so awesome!" and quite frankly I think that is an argument that could come right out of the mind of some PR-driven person that does not actually care about play-ability. It might sell the game to unprepared people who do not give it much thoughts before buying but that is about it.

It is not a positive point that I cannot make out units when I zoom out and that has nothing to do with the speed issues imho.

I think this whole "no icons yey" is a somewhat weird thing that you got into because you feel you can technically go without them now. You just seem to forget that on my 1080p screen units quickly are only a few pixels in size once I zoom out. That is an issue that your fast engine (I LOVE your fast engine tech stuff really, not trying to talk it bad) is not going to fix.

I can relate to that. I work as programmer myself and I know that sometimes there is new fancy tech that you get and it suddenly allows you to do things differently and you think it is awesome (and in many ways it is awesome really) but in reality the old way had certain advantages beyond the performance and you are in danger of losing those advantages. Like in this case being able to actually see more than 3 pixel sized units. That is a massive disadvantage as it is. You force the player to play similar to the way Starcraft 2 is played (I love Starcraft 2), but Ashes clearly is not a game about small scale engagements. It needs a camera solution that works with that and just zooming out halfway and then staying there with units being barely visible is not going to cut it.

Maybe instead of showing icons you could go with scaling up the models based on the zoom level and merging them together. 3D icons that are actually visible. Something similar to what RUSE did, but more advanced.

So enough about this icon stuff... sorry but I really don't like the current way it is handled. It's a negative point to me (in fact the one big negative point there is to say, I like everything else really) and it isn't made better by how it was used in that AMD presentation as a positive point. It certainly does not make the game unplayable, but it would match my feeling a lot more if you were to at least hide this because not having any concept so far of how to give the player an exact overview isn't good. 

 

The unit speed issue is not about icons or not anyway. It does not matter for the speed of the unit if I look at icons or at small unit models. The speed I talk about is the question of "how long does it take a unit to get from location A to location B" and that does not change based on the presentation of the unit.

 

I have not. I am not very fond of "space RTS" mainly because they are too abstract. Space is fully 3 dimensional in my mind it is just doesn't fit the screen very well.

The problem I see is that in a 1vs1 on a map that is supposed to be small it takes 20 minutes of defeating creeps and only then you start to be able to really attack your opponent. On a larger map that would become hours and the point of playing multiplayer just is not to play vs creeps for an hour before you face your human opponent.

That needs to change. There needs to be some potential for small fights from minute 5 or so onwards that then escalates into a larger scale war. This is for small maps and my impression is the current maps are rather small (based on what we were told). On larger maps it isn't bad if it takes longer ofc, but there needs to be a map size to play 1vs1 games on that on average last 30-60 minutes of which the player interact and fight at least 80%.

Currently the games I played took 25 minutes and 20 minutes of those were spent killing AI creeps. The victory points basically had ticked up to 500 by the time the first armies started to fight.

I am positive this can be changed and probably will change a lot. It is really early alpha but we have to talk about it

Cutting the creep numbers in half probably would already "speed" things up, simply because a lot less time would be spent waiting to defeat the creeps.

 

Well i get that you can reduce the size and probably make the units themselves feel faster, but feeling faster wont change how much time it takes for the player to reach an enemy base and actually do some damage. It also wont change the fact when units are figthing theres 0 micro potencial while using missile skirmishers for example since they move at the same speed as everything else.

I agree but i think what people are discussing here isn't related to size, icons or zoom levels.

I think ColaColin sums it up nicely

 About the creeps i feel that speeding up the capture of areas versus neutral can already speed up the game enough in terms of expantion. I kill creeps fast enough but since my units dont group together near the capture point theres at most 3-4 units capturing at a single time.

It might just be my memory but I do recall TA being and/or feeling "slow", especially compared to other games in the genre.  That may just be my faulty memory.  But like I was saying I think smaller, lighter, cheap and battle-ineffective/inefficient "recon" units are definitely worth a look, the overall speed of the current units in the game feels ok for what they are doing.  I think there's a sort of "recon" unit in the game already but I didn't bother with it, I just spammed the ones that sounded like war machines.

Sins of a Solar Empire DID have differing speed amongst its units, but overall units moved very slowly as a whole.  Frigates moved slow, Cruisers moved slower, Capital ships were molasses, and Titans that weren't owned by Vasari Loyalists felt nearly immobile sometimes (exaggerating here).  The Corvettes and scouts did move rather quickly, as did strike craft, and units affected by the Antorak Marauder's speed ability, but overall the pacing and movement of ships in Sins are very very sluggish.  Especially if you compare it to something like Starcraft II's "Colossus".

 

Fair point about not playing Sins (to each his own on genres) but Sins of a Solar Empire, as stated by the devs, was a large influence on the game.  You may not be able to translate the similarities without having played both games.  Actually I'm not being very clear here, what I'm trying to say is - the size, scale, and pacing (to me) seem to be very much in line with Sins of a Solar Empire (a game that I adore without a shadow of a doubt).  It's part of the character and feel of the game and making the game fast simply so you can have a quick 20 minute skirmish to me defeats part of the... flavor (?) of the game.

Now I'm not sure which maps I've played on but most of them have felt on a smaller scale to me so far.  I spent 45 minutes playing the match, about 25 minutes of which were trying to figure out what I was building, why I was building it, where to build it, etc.  The game could and would have been over much quicker.  I will agree, however, that the random creeps tend to.. detract from the game, to a certain extent.  Sins of a Solar Empire had a Pirate system where there was one area that a whole bunch of pirates lived at in the solar system, and if you had the option turned on, they would periodically raid one side (which you could influence via a black market).  I feel that a system more similar to that may "feel" a bit less awkward.

To be honest I think I agree about the creeps (they need some fixing).  I still disagree with the original post in that the units themselves need to be sped up.  Game pacing is fine (from my experience so far) but I do feel the random creeps guarding areas is kind of awkward.

Which, let's be honest, is actually straight out of Sins of a Solar Empire as well.  But there was some rhyme to the reason there.  For example, a "Terran" planet would house far more random creeps and be much more heavily defended by neutrals than, say, a tiny asteroid field would be.  So it required a bigger investment of military resources to clear out and claim.  But in doing so you claimed another Terran planet for yourself, which are high in both metal, crystal, and population (credits) production, so it was an understandable risk-reward setup.

I don't feel that the creeps are offering a meaningful interaction like this in Ashes as of yet.

 

The game had a speed option this guy has it on max but i think you can see how the gameplay is 100% different from AOTS mainly in terms of speed/pace.

And stuff like tier 1 killing heavy tier 2 units by just using micro and kiting is something i doubt will never be possible in AOTS, but im fine with that.

Btw do spam the recon unit early, its the only unit you can sort of spam fast against creeps due to the fact it has the range of the missile skirmisher and has increased attackspeed compared to the low range tanky tier 1 unit.

I honestly think spamming scouts its the fastest way to capture ground. This migth be caused by the fact the missile skirmishers seam to bug out and not shoot near elevations, also the close range tier 1 units only the ones at the front actualy shoot so you can only have 2 squads at one time shooting at creeps. I can just spam scout squads and they are constantly shooting while even moving sideways.

So yeah try them and you will enjoy early game a lot more. My only gripe about scouts is that they do crap damage versus structures but oh well cant have everything.

Why not both? There are tiny maps and large maps in other games as well. You can have a quick 1vs1 on a 5x5 map in SupCom or you can play a 10 hour game on a 81x81 map. Both are possible and both have people who like it.

 

Taking control points from creeps takes quite a while is my first idea here. As an extreme example without any creeps at all and with a doubled victory point requirement games probably would look quite different already.

 

I think what is really happening is that the early stages of the game are constrained quite seriously by your low Logistics limit, meaning you take quite a lot of time to do some early initial expansion.

 

Increasing the starting Logistics to a number more like 40 will mean you can build a larger army earlier in the game, and potentially have multiple expansion parties active at the same time. That should help with the slow early expansion.

 

But in the bigger picture, I think the logistics system as a whole is very thin and needs to be completely redone with something more interesting.

Alright i can agree with that line of thinking.

Yes, i think by the time i reach the enemy im on tier 2 tech if not capital ship tech on current largest map, there isnt any sort of tier 1 harass or raiding oportunity and the game is almost over in terms of victory points, but lets imagine i bypass all the creeps to harass an enemy base the units that would arrive there wouldnt deal any sort of relevant damage.

Yes i think so, for example units like the Archer missiles skirmishers, the Orion arty capital ship and Artemis tier 2 arty since their speed is equal to other closer range units together with the fact units dont stay at maximum range and just move in when you right click makes enganging/disengaging or kiting with them impossible.

Units in general fire to their front, so if you turn around to flee you are garanteed to take a lot of damage and deal 0 in return so engagements to me is all about superior numbers at this point which kinda forces this laid back style of spamming units and growing the unit ball as high as possible.

No i dont think they are too big, and everyone here expects in one way or another bigger and larger maps from this game, even the people wanting faster units i think.

I understand that balancing map size and unit speed is hard but i sort of agree with Mr ColaColin here when he asks.

Imagine when playing a 1v1 the player would zoom in and play a faster game even microing some units, when playing a large 5v5 game with large maps he would zoom out and take it from there.

Granted im not a game designer and i know that the perfect counter argument to this would be that you would have ridicuous zoom levels and units would just look like pixels on the screen on large maps.

 

I don't really mind waiting awhile to engage the "actual" enemy while spending time expanding and building up my army. This is the same way that things were done in Sins and I felt that it gave the player a good opportunity to get a main base of operations set up where the player could retreat to or order units from if all other factories were destroyed.

Yes. Especially when I need to climb up a hill to fight the enemy I felt that by the time I realized the maneuver wasn't going (30 sec to 1 min into the maneuver) to work it was too late and the three capital ships I had sent were already so close to gone that they blew up before even getting down the hill.

Nope, not at all. In fact I was under the impression that they would be much, much bigger to support the amount of units expected.

 

I'd like to mention that one of the reasons that the movement speed in Sins was never a problem to me was because the units had two distinct movement speeds. Between planets and stars there was the obligatory "phase jump" in which all units traveled a much faster speed than in a gravity well (and they all traveled the same speed regardless of how large they were). Within the gravity well of planets, however, the units all had speeds that were representative of their class and maneuvers were possible. I personally liked this aspect of the game since it meant that units were usually too far away to act as the defense (as noted by ledarsi), but each gravity well was like a skirmish that could be checked on occasionally to ensure things were going well.

As far as implementation goes I think a possibility would be to have a "speed mode" in the units where they could pop up in the air slightly (hover higher over the ground) and bolt across the roads in-between generator areas. The units would be unable to use weapons during this time and the bolting would have the same speed for all ground units. I'm basically envisioning a group of units coming to the edge of an outpost area, grouping together, hovering a bit higher, and then bolting to a high speed until they reach the edge of the next outpost where they would all lower to the ground again. This could add something to the game since if it were possible to hit the bolting units with defenses then the roads could be used as effective defenses and if a base was surrounded by defenses the player would have to think twice before bolting right in front of a wall of lasers.

I think that really large maps would allow this to work, but if the distance between different areas is going to be more like the small map (where it seemed that the areas were basically touching) it probably wouldn't work.

These are my thoughts for movement. I also think the game could have a time toggle (Sins had x1, x2, x4, etc options that allowed the beginning to go by much faster since the game was sped up).

I appreciate the info. I didn't realize the units moved at such a high rate of speed. Of course this may due to the true scale of the units not being discernible at this time. If we had buildings or something familiar we would have a true idea of the scale, but we can worry about all that later. At this point I really just wonder what option we will have for moving units faster, or if there will be any. Will we have alternate ways to move units across the battlefield quicker, or do we rely on building them closer to the battle? 

 

 

With the current vision that you have for the game a speed up of the units may not be the best way to solve the issues of traversing the maps we have. We do still have concerns about the gargantuan maps that will be released in the future though. As I stated above, it's really a matter of how we will move units to the other side of the map or reinforce in certain areas on these large maps. With the current speed of the units it makes reinforcing extremely difficult if we are already engaged. By the time the reinforcements get there our force would already be wiped out. If this is intentional then it will force us to think outside the box for solutions. We really won't know for sure until we can really dig into a huge map and test out some different tactics though.

To answer your second part, it does make the units feel sluggish when trying to disengage the enemy. Now in realistic terms I can understand the lengthy disengage since these units are huge and could keep firing for some time at an enemy unit. We are also still learning targeting ranges, hit range on weapons, and things of that nature so in the end we are really just learning the game. After enough time playing we may find that these previous issues aren't really issues, and instead we just had to learn how to play. As far as engaging the enemy, I can't really complain. Since the enemy units are at the same speed as mine it's just a matter of who has the bigger, badder units. Also, asking if the maps are too big is blasphemy! We want huge maps. I'm personally just wondering what options we have other than slow boating across that terrain.

Thanks again for the discussion. We are learning a lot about the vision the team has for the game, helping us to see why certain aspects are what they are.

 

This same sort of situation is actually similar to what happens in Sins, so I'd like to weigh in here.  In Sins of a Solar Empire, you start (typically) far away from your opponent, and slowly but surely move towards each other.  As the game drags on, if you are only using your early factories as your unit-construction buildings, you either 1) Better be winning, and hard OR 2) Are about to experience a very slow and painful overruning as your units take too long to catch up to the frontlines, forcing you to lose ground.  You always build factories close to the front lines, but not necessarily "on" the front line, in order to resupply and further grow your military power.  To start with, factories are relatively cheap and therefore not a huge waste of resources.  It makes defense much easier as you are (likely) getting units onto your defending choke hold faster than your opponent is reinforcing his own army, especially if he did NOT advance his factories.

I recommend you try bringing some Engineers behind your main army and when you find a good defensive spot, put a factory in that location.  It will give you a spot to fall back to in case your offensive turns a bit sour (resupply point) and also allows you to keep your war machine grinding on in case you are pressing your advantage (if your offensive is succeeding).  You may find that doing this gives you a different approach to solving your "slow unit" issue.

The Vasari in Sins also have an "alternate" way to move units across the battlefield but that's not something I see this game implementing at this time.

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Yea, after playing all the RTS games that I have it's normal practice to build forward bases and things of that nature. If the slower pace is what the devs invision for the game I can get behind it, but I still wonder if there will be options for traversing the map faster or if we are suppose to rely on forward bases to compensate for the large maps.  

Maybe even have special buildings on huge maps that allow teleporting or a bonus to the forces that control the region. Would also give larger maps a nice region for player to battle over. Could put region A a couple regions out from the player, then region B would be in the middle of the map. The player would have to control region A and region B before they could use the teleporter. Just throwing out ideas... of course this would only be usable on very large maps.

I guess theres time to test, at least we know they are aware of our concerns overall.

 

 

 

Yep. It will all of us more once we get our hands on the huge maps. Then we can play each map size and see if it all balances out.

I'm not too sure how I feel about teleporters to be honest.  I honestly feel I'm more looking for the longer, slower games where you have to keep your supply chains going and establish forward bases as you progress as opposed to instantly dropping units onto the field.  Maybe a Vasari-esque Phase Stabilizer node system, where you could establish small links between regions by investing a large amount of your economy into construction buildings that allowed for faster travel between them.

But overall I just don't think I'm a fan of teleporting at the moment.  Definitely don't want a Grey Goo Humans teleporter haha.  While absolutely fun to use, I don't think it has a place here.

Kollock -- thanks for engaging with the community like this and for helping focus our thoughts.  I tried to lay out specific thoughts above vs. just saying "make things faster".  That said, having never designed a game myself, it's helpful to understand the rationale behind things and to know which questions to ask/answer.  I realize that we are at a very early stage of development despite the game feeling so polished already, so I'm not knocking the development team in any way.  

I'm just throwing this out as my experience thus far, for what it's worth (or not worth lol ;-)):

• Does it take too long to engage the enemy?

• Are units unable to disengage before they are destroyed?

• Are maps too big?

Agree with almost all of the above.

 

Still id rather have the player control and choose to flank than the AI itself. I prefer to have control on such big manouvers rather than making a meta unit to do it for me.

The key word here is depth of gameplay, what sort of strategic or even micro decisions will you be making when controling units or will you rely on the AI to do it for you, but i guess thats a discussion for another thread.