Future as in post-release I assume. If I was a reviewer I would penalise you for not having something as basic as Map Pings in. They are very useful and have been around in RTS for a loooong time. Initial reviews are so important, a bad Steam review is highly unlikely to ever be re-written even if later patches and additions address the concerns in the review. And while some review sites will go back and look at a game later most don't, the initial review is it. Obviously I am not saying all this just because of the lack of Map Pinging . I assume you'll stick a note of some sort on your review copies mentioning upcoming content like replays and such so the more agreeable sites will mention them. 

Would the two products really cannibalise each other? They seem very different games.

Civ VI in the Autumn? Cool!

Have you ever played Company of Heroes? if not go and try it, its an awesome game.

For me right now having 1 unit or a group of units together as 1 its the same think, its not confusing at all, this game is all about quantity with Quality of course, why i want to see a Factory Throwing out 1 unit at a time every second?

I even want Stardock to change the it and release 10 Brutes in 1 group, it will be easier to handle, and i am a Real RTS Junky (lover), I have played so many RTS games out there, non professionally but I have tried many of them. Having a group of units as  does not mean that you don't have the Freedom of that group, you just have to see it as a unit. and if your problem is about the HP of each unit not showing inside a group i am sure that is not a big deal for the Dev's to fix.

So far me as a player, I like it this way, so here are my thoughts.

I haven't -- WWII is clearly my least favourite "genre/setting". Thanks for the tip though, maybe I'll have a look at it.

But how does the packing work in CoH? Do all of these things apply?

• Some units are built in packs of X actual units (let's say X=7)
• These packs can be (and are supposed to be) joined into armies, where pack distinction is no longer possible
• That such armies of say, 14 actual units can be split, and you'll end up with 2 pack of 7 units each, or 3 packs of 1/1/12, 1/2/11, ... 4/5/5, ..., or 4 packs, or 5, 6, ..., or 13, or 14 packs of 1 unit each? (where 4-6 packs are probably the most likely, but otherwise it's unpredictable...)
• Armies support reinforcements, but you cannot reinforce those 4 actual units you have back up to the original 7, but only to 11, by clicking 1 time?

Now if the above apply to CoH and nobody complained about it, then I humbly accept my defeat

It's not about that, really. The point is to have units be countable normally and reinforcable in a simple manner... And I'm not saying a game can't work like this, what I have been arguing forever is that it seems to be an unnecessary complication...

Well, but you don't have control over the single unit -- or you might, if all but one of a pack have died. And I'm not saying that I usually would want to control single brutes -- it's mostly about consistent unit countability. And not being able to control the single unit feels weird; but we are perhaps a minority who would feel like that...

i think it might be because of the player base..games like this are usually played offline..even in sins..when there is around 1500 players on..you go to mp and there'ss only like 250 people online or less. i'm guessing maybe that'ss why

True the Percentage is very low, I think they said only 5%

But that may change anyway, who knows maybe we can show Stardock and AOTS MP will be big, so time will say if it will be needed or not.

Re-connections are important in games like DOTA 2, I don't remember good RTS games out there with Re-connections.

We need to be very very careful about over-emphasizing the importance of MP.

*I* love MP. You guys love MP.  But if we can get even 10% of the active player base playing MP games I will be extremely happy and surprised.

Ashes is going to get around a 76 metacritic score.  It's going to lose points because:

1. The in-game campaign polish isn't as good as Starcaft/Homeworld
2. Hoverunits
3. Performance requirements
4. Lack of apparent strategic depth

There's not much we can do about 2 and 3.  But items 1 and 4 we still have a chance.  If we work hard enough we could see this game make it to an 80 metacritic.

Now, metacritic isn't the end all be all, but you can generally assume metacritic and user reviews will tend to be fairly close.

Re Brutes coming out as squads:

Reminder, Company of Heroes, an RTS, has units that come out as squads.  A brute squad is still 1 unit. It's just represented as 6.

Because not enough people play MP or would benefit versus the effort it would take.

Thanks for replying. Most of the Founders have no doubt been gaming a while and seen enough reviews to know exactly what bits are going to be praised or criticised but I thought you might be too close to the game to see it You forgot number 5 though: Not being SupCom3 :p

I agree that you need to make the campaign as good as possible. As you say a lot will only play the single player, first campaign then skirmish, so reviews will likely be based heavily on the campaign for many users. Especially so soon after Homeworld. You'll have a lot more MP/Skirmish maps than Homeworld and then a map maker on top so those are big pluses in comparison. I'd drop that mapmaker to everyone asap after the game is out while the iron is still hot so to speak.

i know..i am with you tat..mp should get more love...i rarely play sp....so i guess im in the 5 percent bracket lol...but from a devs point of view..if 5 percent does mp..then their resources should be focused on where the game will be popular the most..ie single player.....but the whole ascension online might reel in more players..lets hope

Whew, lots of stuff in this thread.

As for me, I'm excited about the progress of the game so far, the progress to come before release, release (5 weeks away!), and post release development. Keep up the good work!

Personaly i like the game and i really hope people play it, as there arent really enough RTS's coming out.

But if you think multiplayer shouldnt be the focus, you should have perhaps already have something else single player wise rather than only skirmish vs AI. I have heard campaigns and missions are being worked on but ive yet to see how the game currently can allow for complex missions objectives when it lacks so much depth.

If your working on single player with the current toolset the factions have that feels a bit problematic dont you think? because like you said the game lacks apparent strategic depth, so how are you convincing people to stay and play a game for long periods of time? skirmish? AI? complex missions objectives? COOP vs AI missions?

I think you have to work on your unique selling points and prepare to show them properly because currently im having a very hard time understanding what is that makes Ashes sellable as a game.

From this thread i took modding, engine technical stuff and a campaign as the unique selling points for this game.

Multiplayer is very important to us and the game's long-term success.  But I can tell you straight out, even MP centric games tend to only get 1/5th the player base to even try multiplayer.  

As for the campaign, a first person shooter campaign "lacks strategic depth".   I personally have a blast just playing around with a Nemesis on a map (none of our missions are like that).

People like the Homeworld:DOK campaign.  I am one of them.  Do you think that game has more "strategic depth" than Ashes? One popular mission in that game involves searching hotspots while avoiding sand tornadoes.  The fun is using very finite assets to accomplish goals.

Starcraft's campaigns didn't rely on strategic depth.  There were plenty of missions that involved moving a few marines around to various objectives. And they were fun.

This chart below falls under your NDA.  It's our analysis of various titles on the market.  You're of course welcome to disagree with this but those involved in making this have been making games in this genre for decades (we have literally worked leads on every game on this list other than DOK and the Grey Goo designer is a Stardock employee).

As you can see from this chart, we are under no illusions of what Ashes is good at and not so good at.

The only reason PA and FA don't crush Ashes (as you can see from the chart) are two things largely outside their control:

1. Ease of concept.  We all make that choice the minute we make a game.  For many reading here, this is an irrelevant variable.  But from a "successful product" standpoint, we all take a beating with the streaming economy, lots of units, etc.  

Ashes not having bunches and bunches of similar units ala SupCom is a weakness as far as many SupCom fans are concerned.  But that decision, more than any other, probably kept SupCom from making money (yes, SupCom lost money).

2. Visual Fidelity.  SupCom was state of the art in 2007 when it shipped.  Did you guys know it was the first major RTS to use DirectX 9.0c? It was groundbreaking.  

IN either case, as you can see, AOE 2 HD, which came out years ago, wrecks us.  It's not even close. If it weren't so old it would just be embarassing.  And of course StarCraft is unbeatable too. 

I'm sharing this chart with you guys not to persuade you one way or the other but to help you understand what metrics largely determine whether a game is going to make money or not.

Ashes won't make as much money as SupCom but then again, it's budget is 1/6th of the base SupCom budget (not including FA).  Its budget is about 1/3rd of PA.  

Our advantage is that we can afford to continue working on our game for years. As in, a full time working on the game.  The last PA: Titans update was last October and it was just a MP match making patch.  

That's how the rest of the industry works.  They rely on either crowd-funding OR a publisher.  In Stardock's case, it only has to get the funding from a single lunatic (me).  So whether it's Ashes or GalCiv of Offworld Trading Company or whatever, we can continue updating them essentially forever as long as there's a player base because we can afford it, because we didn't spend a ton up front.

Thanks for taking the time to write that. Very interesting with refreshing honesty. Erm...can I have your job?

Would have been very interesting to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions over those numbers and the category weighting.

Are you expecting any of those numbers in Ashes to change down the line or are these more or less constants?

I'll be curious to see what the 8 for moddability entails in reality. You've only given it a weighting of 4 but I think for a games longevity and for developing and sustaining a supportive community (i.e. active players who will buy DLCs and expansions) you are underestimating it.

Not sure I agree with:

I think the initial very high system requirements and the streaming economy hurt it when it came to casual players picking the game up or not. I would personally like more units in Ashes, both for opening up new strategies for different situations as well as for the simple visual flair and appeal of a mixed battlefield. I know more are coming down the line at some point so that is a nice plus from my point of view.

It probably lost money for simply costing too much to produce to be able to recuperate its costs, a miscalculation on the games potential market size perhaps. Something you are evidently trying to avoid by keeping the budget down. Edit: That first sentence kinda sounds obvious ha, but they had to pay back the publishers a lot of money first before they could take their own cut so simply didn't have much profit beyond that initial payout to keep for themselves. One problem with the old model and what makes it hard for developers to escape that model I'd think as they wouldn't make enough profit to go it alone. Sorry, tangent.

When you measure the budget of Ashes do you separate it from the cost of developing the engine for it? They are obviously linked but the engine will go on to be the foundation for many games so I'm curious where the two budgets, game and engine, converge and diverge.

Cheers.

Lots of good questions.

re What will change with Ashes?

In time, I'd expect presentation, fidelity, multiplayer and moddability to increase.   

re high system requirements on SupCom

That is very true.  But by the time FA came out, it wasn't nearly the barrier it initially was.

Re budget

The engine budget is spread across many projects.  SupCom's budget didn't include much of the base engine because they used much of the Dungeon Siege engine.  But I am including Ashes' share of the Nitrous budget in with the cost.

Hey Frogboy I do think you are an awesome guy, wow cannot believe your showing something that private. I really do appreciate it a lot, to share with all of us that info.

Just some opinions as a player

there is a few thing that it can make the game more interesting, create Worlds with old civilization in it, random Structures on the map, like you said maybe some kind sand tornadoes that they have in Homeworld:DOK campaignand put all that into AOTS.

I want to say if its possible for you to take Homeworld:DOK campaign as an example, its game physics. I love the way when you take down an air unit in Homeworld:DOK, its look really cool when it goes down to pieces and hit the ground and the debris stay, the way how they made the home base, it looks big and complex. me as a player that part made me want to get the game even more. everything in a game that looks awesome and Epic can make a player go and by it.

I did finish Homeworld:DOK campaign and it was fun it took me like 15 hours, because I played some mission 2-3 times over.

The Idea here is about trying to invest some of your time working on the maps, by adding things, make the Air and ground units physics with debris, I know debris will be coming to the game, but what I am talking about is the way how the units explode, that may help a lot the way how people see the game. it make them more interested on the game.

You guys know many players said that the maps looks kind of dead, there is nothing to interact with in the map apart of the games Structures and the units. if that's hard to fix that's fine, but it will be nice to have different things to see in the game and interacts like if you make a group of buildings and shoot at them, they will get destroyed and see pieces of those building falling to the ground and maybe making some kind smoke around that buildings, take some of your units inside it to hide for a 30 sec or something like that. that kind of ideas will make a player more interested in the game

Homeworld:DOK use DX9, It uses Unity, For me Unity its an ok easy Engine to use and learn but not a big Engine complete engine(Personal opinion, i may be wrong) While Nitrous Engine looks so Advanced in every-way that i do hope you guys can make it the best Engine for RTS games out there in the next few years.

I still do think the maps needs way more Height Variations, sorry I think I am the only one who is always bothering with that.

All that help make way better strategies in the game and give it more Replayability value. without adding hard Coding to the Engine. (I think)

Homeworld: DOK also had multiples of our budget to spend.  Look at the art assets in that game.

I agree with pretty much everything you said.  We'd love to have ruins and burned out cities and such.  But such assets are expensive and you pay a price.  DOK only has 5 skirmish maps.  That's the exchange they made.  And now it's down to 200 people playing it at any given time.

Making a game is a lot like playing a game. That is, you have to pick very very carefully where you spend your finite resources.  DOK used theirs on the campaign.  Part of ours was to make procedurally generated maps.  So we can produce maps a lot easier but they won't be as asset rich as a hand crafted map like what's in DOK.

DOK can do extensive effects with destroyed units because they only have a handful of units and it's using an engine that's had many years to create timeline animations like that.  We certainly could do that with Nitrous but again, it's a trade off.

This is DOK's average daily players.  If this happens to Ashes, we're dead.  

Below is GalCiv III's:

This is what we hope to get.  Steady (you can see the weekends, lol).  

And below are GalCiv (green) and DOK (blue):

What you see above are people playing the campaign, then trying out skirmish and seeing ift here's a MP community. When they don't find one, it's done.

Without active players, there's no word-of-mouth.  Without word-of-mouth sales decrease.

So what lessons would you take from this?

1. DOK has a great campaign.
2. DOK had pent up demand ready to give the game a try
3. DOK wasn't able to hold on to its user base

If you want an active player base,  you have to first have a good single player game.  If you can keep that going (fun single player, campaign, mods, missions, etc.) then you can grow it further with multiplayer.  But multiplayer isn't the foundation.  Single player is.

Some other stats to bear in mind:

"You should release a new race for free.."

No.  Free races are never a good idea because most people never play anything outside 1 race.

Example:

Note that most people play the default Terran Alliance race in GalCiv III. They don't even bother to create a custom human race with some slight customization.  Even though every race in GalCiv has its own unique ships and technology tree almost nobody plays them.   Instead, the play humans, space girl (Altarian) and robots (Yor).

That's why when people say "Ashes needs a third race" you can say BS.  It doesn't "need" a third race.  We plan to add one in the future but that won't substantially affect our player base. 

If you want to increase the player base of your game, you need to statistically look at what people like to do in your game and give them more of it.  This is often at odds with the really hard core fans.

In GalCiv III, if we took all our orders from fans, the game would be dead now as we would have put all our efforts into multiplayer games features and making huge maps more fun.

Similarly, when focusing on "the AI needs to be tougher on insane.."

Even I'm shocked at this stat in GalCiv.  Beginner? Really?!

Well, it turns out yea. In even regular Civilization, most people just want to build a civilization. They don't even care what the other players are doing. Give them interesting stuff to build and make it feel like they're making something worthwhile and voila.

Hence, Ashes is more likely to get diplomacy and trade features before a third race. Let the player feel like they're building something and you'll have a happy but relatively quiet fan base.

What about map sizes?

Note, these aren't games finished. These are games started (games played).  These are GalCiv stats but that's a game that if you read the forums you'd assume everyone wants ever bigger maps.  In fact, no, they want small maps.

Anyway, I bring this stuff up to help you guys better understand why we make the decisions we make on these games.   

Our target is to have 500 or so people playing on average in Ashes at any given time by April 30th.  I'm not sure we'll be able to do that.  But that's our goal.

thanks for all the info..and i agree from having a third race..it is nice to have different variety but as a game i play the most (sins) i only see people playing tec or advent..vasari is a very small group..sometimes in 5s ..theres no vasari at all or maybe just 1.

Frogboy I really think you are misinterpreting the GalCiv map size stats. Or potentially you are.

A lot of people start a small map if they want to test out a tactic quick or check how something in game works. I have myself started dozens of small maps just for this reason, yet only have a handful of larger maps, which I took more seriously. Actually, if I want to do some kind of test I tend to do small/beginner/terrans. After I figure out what I want I abandon the game. It's plausible that a lot of other people do this too, which would explain how skewed the stats are for small/beginner/terrans. I argue it's much more plausible than assuming most people prefer those settings.

Second, number of starts doesn't necessarily equate to popularity in terms of time spent in game. I have spent more in-game time inside larger maps because they are more enjoyable, despite having far fewer large map starts. By nature larger maps will take longer to play, which would be another reason using starts skews the stats against larger maps.

Lastly, it is conceivable that some people tend to avoid large maps because the UI is so cumbersome for large maps. If the UI supported large maps better, perhaps they would be more popular.

If you understand the above you might reconsider your stats methodology, because it has some flaws, perhaps fatal ones. You'd be better off measuring time spent in game relative to map size instead of starts relative to map size to gain a much better understanding of what is actually popular in your game. Bringing this back around to Ashes,relying on "games started" stats to measure popularity suffers the same flaws in Ashes as it does for GalCiv, so be very careful how you interpret them and perhaps consider alternate measurement methodologies.

This is an interesting perspective I didn't know of before hand, thanks for posting those. 

Just my observations, without any acces to numbers to back them up:

Players that play skirmishes against easy or beginner CPU opponents seem to enjoy turtling a lot. In SC;FA maps that gave you just one easily defended choke-point always were among the most played, even online. 

The game as-is gives a lot of options for "competitive" players to try new tactics to expand, tech and build raiding forces of different compositions in skirmish games. There is in my opinion less emphasis on options for people to go sim-city and build up large defensive bases and go from there.

If we accept my premise that the earlier mentioned vs. beginner AI  skirmish players prefer building up a large defensive base, then what were the design considerations to focus more of the strategic options on a more aggressive play style?

Cool info Frogboy and good alternative view Eviator. Interesting stuff.

In ashes I sometimes jump into a game for 5 minutes to check something and pop out again, I can see that sort of thing skewing figures. For GalCiv I wonder what the charts would be like if you removed all games under an hour or two of play time (or whatever might be appropriate for that game, I don't have it to know). There is also the flip side of that where game problems/limitations put players off other sizes or difficulties etc. which Eviator covered. As Eviator also says, hours played on different map sizes would also be interesting rather than just games started as large maps inherently take longer.

Stability is the cornerstone to reach that, if things don't work people drop games very quickly nowadays as there are so many other games or forms of entertainment to snag them.

Thank you, i mean not many people/developers would share so many information with random people on the internet. It does indeed help get into the developer mindset a bit.

I think the wilingness to keep working on the game for long periods of time post launch is what you probably should market and pitch for people, post launch effectivly, with blog posts, patch notes etc..

Take my experience as a grain of salt, but having spent so much time in games like Grey Goo and Act of Agression, ive felt that people sometimes are willing to overlook the flaws in the game if theres hope at the end of the tunel for future improvements, and thats where you kinda can get a very core loyal fanbase. You shouldnt also fell into the trap of promising too much, but having a core set of features you are willing to show the playerbase is always good.

And yes i do agree single player should be a core focus these day's, since its what will probably give multiplayer a breeding space and probably give incentive for people to play multiplayer, since people start the game by usually playing versus the AI or the campaign and then they go for multiplayer. If you look at steam reviews RTS games that have an overall good single player seem to have better review score than the ones that focus especially on multiplayer.

Examples: Act of agression mostly focused on multiplayer(i personaly love the game), sadly had a tons of people expecting Command and Conquer level missions and campaign, generaly negative reviews. If you look at a big quantity of people that still play multiplayer a bunch of them is Vs AI custom games, free for alls and large teamgames.

Grey goo had a short but focused campaign, sligthly skewed towards being almost multiplayer only title, had a tournament and everything including a free race, it doesnt come close to having a propper playerbase.

So yes do focus on single player, and about multiplayer i would try to improve how large teamgames work at the moment, no need to focus extensivly on 1vs1, but i think thats what people look for when watching your steam page, large scale massive particle effects blowing all over the place with ships.

Your so right about all that, i had a lot of Fun with the campaign, and its the same think as you said, finished the campaign and after tried a MP game, but i did not see any MP game, so what i did is i just quit the game and did not come back to it.

Homeworld:DOK was not able to keep its players in the game after finishing the campaign, because of the only 5 MP maps? is that the real reason for them to loose all its player base? or because they got into a MP game to try and did not find anyone to play with?

Well anyway AOTS is shaping really well, and I want to say that I am a very proud of you guys, your doing a good job, I do hope to see you guys making the Nitrous Engine way better by the day, and I do hope in the Future that you keep Adding new art assets and timeline animations to Units and the Maps.

I will love to see that happening in AOTS.

A long time ago I dreamed about playing an RTS that the map is the whole Planet, the biggest and logest RTS games in the world where it may take days to finish a map, all the game be streamlined with no loading, you can zoom in all the way to see a tank, ans zoom all the way out to see the whole planet, the map is big that when you create a base somewhere in the map with a really big army and you zoom out all the way to just see a little dot of this base in the planet,, something like having the biggest AOTS map and multiply and connect all the maps together by the thousands, with Harvesters ala C&C, when your done with a big map/tiny map, you move on the the next map, by expanding and, with Transportation, Reinforcement, Income trade, Diplomacy, and Every map is so different from being inside a whole city, small town, to deserts, mountain and sea.

I hope see something like that in the Future.

Act of agression had a moderatly good multiplayer and way more multiplayer maps that DOK, people still complained about the lack of maps, so i would guess maps alone werent the issue. To me it feels that team games in DOK arent apealing and it will take just a couple of weeks for the same type of gameplay loop to get boring, even if the loop is good it wont grab you for high amount of time.

I couldnt agree more, it should give it a more sins feel to it, and improving the team base aspect of the game.

Adittionaly i would even like it to have a propper tech tree like sins than a third faction