Ashes: WEEK 5 DEV STATUS

I will be upset if this doesn't somehow make it into future naming schemes.  

If someone doesn't find the game fun there are two likely issues:

1. They don't really understand the game. Often this comes down to not knowing the power of quanta/research/orbitals or not understanding the value of unit composition. Can you come up with scenarios that highlight the depth of these in a way that convinces them that such aspects are more than just "oh isn't that nice" but actually crucial to gameplay depth? Show them how powerful each orbital can be when used right or how the right composition of a small force of units can defeat a much larger force.

2. The game doesn't have what they are looking for. While some just want an iteration of their favorite RTS game, others just consider Ashes to be lacking depth. If it is indeed true that RTS games don't really begin to show off their potential until after months of post-release development, maybe the skeptical can be converted when the game reaches the more mature status. Is it viable to ask people who don't find the game fun to come back in a year?

I am skeptical of the phrase "Both the PHC and the Substrate need more tools to execute more types of strategies." Specifically how your two new units are supposed to help that. These just offer ways of countering enemy compositions, which is a tactical thing. If you want to improve strategic depth units are not the best way unless you are giving them radically different abilities (e.g. teleportation, behavior modification, ridiculous power). Otherwise strategic options mainly come from buildings, economy, orbitals and research. I think you'd be better served by holding off on new units and deeping research instead. The sentry was a decent idea from a strategic standpoint, not because of what the sentry was (mix of brute and archer) but for how it could be used (back-capping and harassment of poorly defended regions).

As for the way DLC is being handled it would be nice if there ends up being some in-game message that says something like

"Hello, this lobby contains some DLC content that you will be able to play with since it is owned by the host.  However, if you would like to host your own lobby or play single player skirmish with this DLC content then please consider checking out our available DLC."

This way it can be made really obvious to the players and maybe even lessen any possible confusion.

Here, better tutorials are needed, but that is only part of the problem.  The biggest way to learn how to play is to use replays, not videos.  Replays allow you to slow/stop action and look around.  This is one thing Planetary Annihilation did correctly, and should be used as a model on how replays should be done & offered.

Another thing missing is a "mayhem playground" mode that would be used for learning everything.  That means, you have unlimited amounts of everything, and the AI should slowly at first, send a wave or two at you...getting progressively harder as time goes on.  This allows people to learn how to use everything that AotS offers in their own time.  In this mode, there is no game over, the AI regenerates stronger & stronger attack waves, it just continues forever until the user quits.

This is a catch-all position, obviously the people that don't find this game appealing at its current incarnation are looking for something more that is missing from AotS.

The way many (most people if you look at sales vs online players) people play RTS is mainly for the single player aspect.  This involves a story.  This involves immersion. This makes people associate with what you are controlling and the campaign to get it done.  Relic's RTS games did a good job of this most of the time for example.  The next thing that can make or break a game involves game mechanics, it should make it easy to do what the user wants.

Rather than beating a dead horse about the current story & immersion of AotS (which is supposed to be in the works), people first have to get the game mechanics, and then be able to pick it up quickly.

Unfortunately, AotS makes this much harder for many people because of the many little things that need a ton of polish.  Each item that has issues by itself may not mean much, but, add them all together, and it becomes a big issue.

So, is it good advice to tell people the game isn't quite finished (or "matured") yet?  Well, nobody has to say anything officially, the end product shows, and lots of user reviews also tell this.  There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

That means, to keep the current players interested, they need content to keep them from fading away.

The people that don't have this game yet are waiting for a "GOTY" edition to get a "complete" (more matured) game, though, some will buy if the game is cheap enough--but those players won't stick around that long without new content / issues fixed.

## Building the Community ##
Steam reviews matter now. A lot.
They determine whether a given game will be promoted or shown to other gamers. If a game falls under 70%, it disappears from visibility on Steam unless you explicitly search for it.
If you read the negative reviews of Ashes they are mostly from people who feel Ashes isn't Supreme Commander. They are right. It's not. It's not supposed to be.
But, unlike Supreme Commander, Ashes is being actively developed and I hope people feel like we're listening to their input. Effectively trying to bury our game won't summon a new version of Supreme Commander. It just makes the game mostly likely to succeed it in the large scale RTS genre have a harder time.
That doesn't mean people should give the game a good review or refrain from giving it a bad review. Rather, it is to make sure people understand that on Steam, these reviews do matter and there are real consequences to them.
We had a game called Sorcerer King which has its fans. It's a good game. But some of our own fans who loved Fallen Enchantress nailed it because they wanted a Fallen Enchantress 2 not a different fantasy game. They got the game's review score under 70 and sales evaporated (because you couldn't find it). That was the end of that game. Now, some of those players have changed their review to positive (it's at 70% now) because they now see that SK could evolve into a bigger game than Fallen Enchantress given the time and resources. But it's too late. That ship has sailed.
Ashes is selling reasonably well and its daily player base is slowly creeping up. It'll probably take until the end of Summer for it to catch up and surpass the average player base of SupCom: FA provided that the SupCom fans give Ashes an opportunity and don't bury it before.
Even SupCom isn't SupCom after all. They aren't referring to SupCom 2 or SupCom 1. They're specifically referring to SupCom: FA which came out 6 months after SupCom shipped. Let's see where we are in 6 months.

@Frogboy,

Just to let you know that i have the founder edition but i do not really enjoy the game.

I guess it's either because it doesn't match my expectations in terms of gameplay or because i did not get how to have fun with it.

However since i recognize it obviously has great qualities i've given and written a positive review on Steam.

I think all the stuff designers and developpers have achieved so far deserve that i give this game a chance and see if i can enjoy it on the long term

I don't completely understand the "please give reviews part". So far I haven't given a review, because I believe the game is not yet done. If I treat the game in its current state as it was done, I basically MUST give it a negative review. On the other side, I can't give it a positive review because it wouldn't be fair towards potential customers to act as if features were already implemented, that simply aren't yet but hopefully still come.

If I wrote a review now, the negatives would outweigh the positives:

Positive:

Nice lighting effects.

Tons of units available at once.

The interface is, all in all very accessible and allows for interacting efficiently, making playing a round of Ashes somewhat satisfying.

The game runs performant, also and especially the net code. In general, thechnically, I feel this game is very stable.

Moddable engine with a constant flow of small content updates.

Incredible support by the developers.

Lots of maps in all kinds of sizes.

Great AI.

Solid multiplayer experience.

Negative:

Units look bland and it is not clear from looking at them what their role could be. Also their names don't give a clue. What does a Nemesis or an Artemis do? In old Greek Lore, Artemis was the goddess of hunt, so one could think that this could be a sniper unit, but it's the other way around.

Maps lack detail, look barren and empty. One of the biggest let-downs.

It is hard to relate to the units/factions. What is a post human really? How does he or she look like? What are their motives? In Dawn of War I feel like I am freaking Gabriel Angelos and my Chapter is overrun or like I can bring "The Greater Good" to this sector of the universe with my high-tech glass gun units. The motives of PHC and Substrate are unclear to me, all I can do is shrug my shoulders, there is no drama.

Unbalanced maps. Starting on the right/in the East on Deneb WILL make the game harder.

A "meta unit" or "army system" that is unusable. This system is so flawed, that it should not have been integrated into the game at all and should not be advertised. Units are spaced out rather than clustered, making them weaker as to just having one blob that is not integrated into one army.

Deal braker: only two factions.

So for now I would give it a thumbs down. After initially checking it out, I just hardly come back to the game anymore. If you are okay with a negative review, well, I'll gladly post it.

-pac

9 positives, 6 negatives. From what I have seen, the developers take constructive criticism very well.

They also come with blurbs to help clarify their roles. Personally I don't have any issues with the names.
Artemis: Long-range artillery cruiser (Artemis is often depicted with bow and arrows, which is a suitable analogue to long range artillery)
Nemesis: Anti-Dreadnought sniper cruiser (nemesis: "the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris", well suited for an anti-dreadnought cruiser)

People after the technological singularity.

This likely wouldn't be something that we would completely comprehend until we become one of them. Give it a couple of hundred years and join them.

Computronium.

This is twice as good as some RTS games.
Third faction will come in time.

Moomo:

the negatives might not outnumber the positives, but they're more important to me. If somebody asked me "should I buy this game" I would say no.

You said "Third faction will come in time": This is exactly the problem with my review. I can only review what is there and not what will be there or even what I hope will be there.

-pac

Megas, I've made the "unfinished" argument before. The game doesn't meet your expectations for a polished product. The devs' counter-argument is "name me a recent RTS game that was this far along upon release." Said another way, it's not fair to compare a game just released to a game that's been around for a couple years. I am still torn on the right approach as a game player.

I gave GalCiv3 a negative steam review at release because I was very unhappy with the state of the game relative to what was promised. It was rated one of the most helpful steam reviews for the game. I promised that if the game ever got fun, I would change my review to a positive one. I did change the review at patch 1.4 to a positive, but I've regretted doing so. Now at 1.7 the game still isn't fun because they haven't addressed key issues regarding management of large empires.

Now while I felt justified in giving the negative review, I know for a fact that I am singularily responsible for at least 10 people not purchasing the game. I thought I was doing a service to each player I turned away. I also felt I was doing a service to the game by giving them incentive to fix the issues that bugged me. In the latter respect I now realize I was shortsighted. The devs have a vision and roadmap for the game that they will pursue using the budget available, and my desires do not necessarily line up.

All of this long-windedness to say that if you do write a negative steam review, make and clearly state the commitment to keep an eye on Ashes and flip it to a positive when the game does get closer to your desires. But don't expect the devs to grant your every wish. Allow them to build the game they want to build. Once you can start up a match as say "yeah I guess this game can be fun sometimes", it's time to turn the thumbs down into a thumbs up. If you're not willing to commit to this, you are better off not writing a review at all, in my opinion.

Despite the negatives you mention, which I mostly agree with (except armies...I like the idea), I happen to find Ashes fun enough to justify a positive review. I hope they make quick progress on the things you mentioned (and other things), but in the meantime I can manage to try to enjoy the game for what it is now.

Personally, I am looking for feedback, especially actionable criticism.

I really like Megas feedback because it's actionable.

The problem we're having is finding enough criticism that is actually actionable:

EXAMPLE of actionable criticism:

1. The maps are drab and static that it takes me out of the game
2. The units and buildings are very static which doesn't conform to the quasi-real art style. Are the units meant to be abstract or are they meant to be real?
3. The user interface does not provide sufficient feedback to make me feel like I can effectively construct defenses in a way. For example, when I place a smarty, it should show the ranges of the other smarties so that I can easily create overlapping defenses. 
4. The army system makes me feel like I have almost no control over my units. I have almost no say over the order of battle when attacking another army even if I want to.  I should be able to tell my army to target X, Y, Z in the other army.
5. I don't feel like there are enough units to give me a wide enough set of strategic options. For example, with air I have bombing and air superiority. But there's no real close air support. In warfare, there are lots roles for aircraft that don't exist here.  There's no Cielo type unit in this game (as one example).
6. I don't feel like there's enough single player game styles. There's skirmish and scenarios. But skirmish's have almost no setup options. In TA I could customize each game to the Nth degree. No air units or no nukes or no whatever.  Ashes doesn't let me even affect the resource output of a planet or environmental conditions.

That's the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

But most of the feedback I get is this:

1. I should be able to zoom out and play the entire game with icons views like SupCom.
2. Get rid of the Nexus and replace with a Commander
3. You should have 4 factions, like SupCom, that are all identical but with different graphics.
4. You need wrecks
5. You should get rid of engineers and just have everything auto build itself
6. Get rid of hover units and instead have them be tanks with treads.
7. You need Experimental units.
8. Your buildings should have adjacency bonuses
9. You need to have Naval units. Every game (except StarCraft, WarCraft, Company of Heroes, Grey Goo, Act of Aggression, etc.) has naval units.
10. You need more resources. Like 8 of them or more. 

I've been meaning to write a long article on the vast differences between forum goers and the average gamer.  Examples I've learned (the hard way)

• Very few people play on big maps
• Very few people play on difficulties above easy (forget normal)
• Very few people play multiplayer even in multiplayer focused games
• Very few people play skirmish, they only play the campaign and that's it
• Most people prefer to just build up a base and care relatively little about the tactics

Now, I am much more like a forum goer which is why we all get along so well.  But when it comes to user reviews (and game reviews) the factors above are hurting us.

We have to satisfy the above people's wants too because they represent the bulk of the sales while not alienating our most loyal customers.

Oh my gosh this again. Many of us start games on small maps and easy modes when trying out new ideas and tactics. Since you cannot filter these out from your statistics, it means your statistics are skewed. Secondly, if you make the gameplay for skirmishes, large maps, and MP better, more people will play them. It's because those modes need improvement that few people play them. These arguments are the same with GalCiv3 and unitl you realize this fact you will be misaligning your roadmaps.

imho this game needs more manpower

the game has to grow faster or people may lose interest (even possible buyers!)

Megas, your review, whether negative or positive, should be accurate, relevant information.  I'd read your review and ignore it because your problems with the game don't particularly concern me.  Someone else who shares your view could use the information though, a good negative review of a game the right people will like, prevents more down the road when the wrong people buy it.

When I reviewed it, I gave it a positive for it's excellent skirmish design, but gave a caveat that it was a less than stellar campaign.  I also stated that it wasn't Supreme Commander, not to expect multiple tiers of base defenses and strategic weaponry, and explained that it was a different kind of RTS built around zone control.

Whether you say it sucks, it's awesome, or anywhere in between the two, you should tell people why in an intelligible fashion.  That way we can all get fewer people buying a game that isn't for them, down voting it half an hour in, and refunding...

I tend to trust our stats more than forum anecdotal evidence.

Hello Brad.. i kind of stopped playing the game for now, I still love the game and i really want to get into it and play everyday for at least 1 hour, i will jump into the game again, but I will be waiting for the next good update.

My reasons are:

•  There is no easy way to share my own made maps, you said that if a player have a map and the other does not and want to play MP they can do it by having the host to create a game with the new map and everyone else get in, and that's awesome, but what about the thousands own made maps?
• I love the maps mostly the big maps, I don't like to play small maps like the rest of you guys, my main reason of buying this game was because its going to have really big maps, but..... the maps need to have more things in them, like rivers, lakes, and way more height variation (not 1 more, but at least 5 more) adding more options to the maps, I want to add green Grass to one side of the map, and the other side snow/ice, right now we cannot do that.
• Why not give the Player more MP options ala DOTA 2, what I mean here is add checkbox to different options to the matchmaking, 1v1-2v2-3v3, frozen maps, night maps, Terran maps, desert maps, small maps, medium maps, big maps, AI vs Humans, etc... things like that, so me as the player I go ahead and choose/enable the checkbox: (1v1, 2v2, fozen maps, night maps, medium and big maps and click to start looking for players)..........it may take few seconds to minutes to find one. At least I have the option to decide what kind of game I want to get into.
  The Dev's said before, we are not gonna add 2v2 or 3v3 because there is not enough players who plays big maps, but if you let the players decide what kind of game they want to play by choosing all the options from the checkbox, it will be way better, choose example:( 1v1 and 2v2 options with all the other check-boxes enabled then the game system will start searching for 2v2 games first(bigger games first), lets say 30 seconds to a minute after that if there is no available players for a 2v2 game then the system will move down and search for 1v1 games. the idea is to make an automatic search system in the game.
• I am just really tired of playing 1v1 ranked games(before release), all of them are rushed games.. I want bigger maps and I want the game to do the search for me, do not make it ranked if you want but give us that auto-match.
• It will be nice to have new Skins for PHC and Substrate, just to see something that look different in a race, the look of the units and Structures, that's it.

I am not asking for more units, I am not asking for naval, I am not asking for a third race of fourth, while all that will be a very good addition to the game, just put them in the upcoming expansions.

but I am asking for things to make the game maps look a little better, and better MP options to get in a game faster.

All that will help a lot of new players to like more the game, and of course have more fun with it.

Thx in advance for reading our feedback.

Quoting Frogboy, reply 14

I tend to trust our stats more than forum anecdotal evidence.

Good grief Charlie Brown, I thought you guys were computer scientists. It's not the stats that are the problem. It's your interpretation of what those stats mean about player preference that is possibly folly. By your same logic people prefer Brutes over Zeus because they are more numerous. Sound ridiculous? Exactly.

Forget it. I'm tired of caring more about this more than you do. I have better things to do.

Quoting eviator, reply 16

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 14

I tend to trust our stats more than forum anecdotal evidence.

Good grief Charlie Brown, I thought you guys were computer scientists. It's not the stats that are the problem. It's your interpretation of what those stats mean about player preference that is possibly folly. By your same logic people prefer Brutes over Zeus because they are more numerous. Sound ridiculous? Exactly.


Forget it. I'm tired of caring more about this more than you do. I have better things to do.

That is a pretty arrogant attitude to have considering you don't have any of the numbers in front of you.

I agree with your earlier point that larger maps probably get played less because of long wait times compared to ranked or small maps and also because people get fed up of Orbitals a bit as you need Jammers everywhere. Also a lack of better ways to manage and keep track of things when you are covering a lot of land. If I was the Devs I'd put everyone I can on improved control and UI support as so much work needs to be done there. I won't bring them up here as many have done very good lists of the needed improvements already.

I can also believe most don't play that high of an AI difficulty level as many will jump into MP or on the flip side, following this game has made me realise how many casual players there are who like to stay in a comfort zone.

Yes people jump into Beginner/Easy or what have you to try things but to suggest only you see that and a team of Devs don't is a bit much.

Thanks for this feedback.

Let me address this in two parts:

First, I like every idea you give here.  Usually someone posts ideas and I think "oh that would be awful" in half the cases.  But in what you posted, I agree with every one of them.

Second, let me walk you through each one and present the challenges:

Re sharing  player made maps seamlessly.

This won't be easy any time soon because a map is 140MB in size on average.  People will have to, for the time being, share maps the same way they do in other games, which is through mod sites.  Eventually we'll have Steamworks support for this to allow people to do this.  But there won't be a case in the near term where the host is transferring a 140MB file to several people.  

Re map features like lakes and rivers.

This is more of a cosmetic thing.  Something we want to have but it will be awhile because we can either have more map detail or more map environments on a single map because of video memory.

RE MP options

More quick-match options.  Agree here.  People just aren't creating custom games like we thought. Everyone seems to wait for other people to do it. It's a little frustrating to see a bunch of people online and just waiting.  So this will need to be done.

Re cosmetic skins

They're coming but it'll be awhile.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how our data is collected.  You seem to think we have this big pile of maps played or games played and just average it out.

It's vastly more sophisticated than that.

Even someone without access to our data could use Steam data to get a fairly accurate representation of what people are doing just by looking at Steam achievements each player has.

The team ran into this with Civilization V (as they wrote that too). People on the forums demanded huge maps and what not when in fact the % of players (NOT games) that ever completed a single game at any size was tiny). The % of players who ever even tried a large map was very small.  The % of players who ever tried to play multiplayer.  It's all tied to anonymous user accounts.  

It's like the people on forums who rip on GalCiv III and yet are shocked to find, now that Steam has updated their user reviews, that the recent reviews of it are overwhelmingly positive. How is that possible? Because most people don't play the game the way active forum members do.  

That doesn't mean you don't listen to the hard core fans (and I mean hard core fan in a positive way here) but  you have to balance that out.

IMHO, the army system is a brilliant breakthrough that will be copied in every future RTS. But it needs a lot of work to make it so players can use it efficiently.

I've only played a handful of games so far, but my main gripe is that the UI for unit selection is broken. The way armies and control groups interact is a muddle. I can have an army, and I can have a control group, and those two things can be different. Is there really a use-case for this kind of functionality? If so then there needs to be a better way to visually differentiate between armies. And armies should also be represented by a single-icon in the control group on the side.

On that same note, if I reinforce an army those units will be generated all over the map. But I am also building units, and summoning units to multiple different armies. Right now, there's no visual indication to tell me where a unit is going or whether it's part of an army. What happens to me multiple times in a game is that I will be building a new army (by queuing units manually) and reinforcing my existing armies. When my new army reaches an appropriate size, I'll draw a box to select all the new units, create a new army and assign it to a control group.

Can you guess what happens when I do that?

Some of the units I selected in the box would be reinforcements and so my selection would grab them AND THEIR ARMY. Of course, that army is on the other side of the map, so I have no idea. And when I made my army and my control group I dissolved my existing army (or several) and control group (or several) and joined them all into one.   

To make it even more infuriating, this new super-army will immediately attempt to re-form around the strongest unit in the army, which might be anywhere. That often means that armies fighting on the front lines will break off their attack, laboriously turn around, and head off randomly. And the simple fact is that I might not even notice.  (Wait where'd the defensive army I planted on my southern flank go?)

Now maybe I am unaware of some UI mechanics that could help me, but my suggestions are the following

1. When you have selected units that are not on the screen there needs to be a visual indication that units are off the screen (and which direction)
2. Drag-select, should not pick reinforcement units.
3. Reinforcement units should have some visual indication that that's what they are (both in the building queue and on the screen).
4. Making a control-group should be the equivalent of making an army - that is it should merge those units into an army automatically - unless multiple armies are selected.
5. (edit) If a control-group has multiple armies in it, those should be signified by army-type icons, rather than breaking down all the units in the control-group.
6. (edit) There needs to be some visual indication to differentiate army groups. Just a dot of color might be enough. Red team and Blue team! Go!

140MB?

Just what is included in the map that makes it so huge? (I haven't come across any docs on this)

For example, other games use height maps for the terrain, so it is broken down to what this shows for SC.

What is it that AotS is doing differently, that it needs vast amounts of memory?

Not memory as much as disk space. 

The answer: No real optimization yet in that area.

That's really sad news to hear, yes 140MB still is a lot, I have done big maps and they are around 400MB, but still without an easy way to share them it will be very hard to get them out there for everyone to try and play.

• Frogboy I ask for you to do some kind of Map making competition, limit it to 2 per upload per User, you guys can look into them ad choose the best five maps and give them to the community as a game update once every month. at least this is a good idea to try to get the Community to do maps and you guys share the chosen ones to everyone.

What do you guys about this Idea? Some competition will be good for the community.

Thx for answering Brad, but please give us a small explanation why this cannot be done? more Video Memory you mean more Ram for the Video card?, so right now the game needs at least a Video Card with minimum of 2GB or Ram, it will mean that you will have to ask for a minimum of 4GB of Ram for you to add more Cosmetic things to a map? or your talking about the normal big map is About 400MB, then if you add more Cosmetics to the game then the maps size will go all the way up to 600MB or more?

if its about the map size will be bigger, then who cares, most of us have a lot of space on the HDD, please work on that for us it will be much better looking maps.

I am just worried about Nitrous Engine to need way more horse power from a Pc in every-way possible for it to give us more eye candy maps.

I remember a long time ago you said or somebody else said that that with DX11 you can do awesome good looking maps but not a lot of units and the other way around because DX11 cannot handle it but with DX12 you can do both.

How True is that?

Just a heads up. I started about a dozen matches of Proving Grounds today while working on some ideas for a scenario. I thought I'd let you know in case you happen to look at my stats and come to the mistaken conclusion that I prefer tiny maps.

And another player starred a dozen matches on a huge map working on some ideas for a scenario.