This whole entry reads like a love-letter to the quiet majority of us. Not neglecting single-player? Awesome. Helping those of us who can't afford the best hardware? Great. Mod support? I'll be buying a gift copy for my brother. Expansion? I'll be happily giving you more money when it's released.

Thanks for all you do!

Yep.

This kind of dedication is what is cruelly missing to the RTS market, and this market is pretty risky nowadays, we have to admit that. You keep believing in your product, you enhance it for the majority of people, you plan new improvements and features over a good period of time, and maybe the most important : you keep continuously your community in the loop. The game has made good steps forward since the release and your expansion price policy regarding early owners seems fair.

Sure, there are plenty of things to improve (range of engagements, concave effects, clearer frontlines, FX or SFX, construction grid...) plenty of things to implement (new faction in the tubes maybe?), but your efforts are really appreciated.

Keep up the good work

This is totally bizarre to me. I don't know where to begin.  I don't know why I expect people to make sensible use of their leisure time. 

To the devs I will say that you might be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by focusing on this stat: when you pumped last second time/personnel/ and resources into single player, you must have done this at the expense of multiplayer, right? 

I think no matter what way time and resources are allocated, single player will get more play time, to be sure, but I'd like to think that the longevity of the game, and its continued sales may be tied more to multiplayer than that 5% may lead you to believe. 

Very much looking forward to this. The features and pricing and implementation model are all very thoughtfully done. Day 1 purchase for sure.

We're definitely doing a lot for multiplayer too.  But yes, it does mean we've been budgeting engineering time on features that will benefit both.  For example, the expansion is set to allow 16 players to play, even in multiplayer (though we still have to stress test this).  So that's cool for MP players still but also for single player gamers who want to have a massive 4X game like experience.  However, that engineering time came at the expense of the replay feature which got pushed back.

Does that mean no replays in september ?

No Replays.

Big -1 on that decision.

that's how you learn where you went wrong in multiplayer.

Sadness.

Supreeme commander was released, and then comes Forged Alliance stand alone expansion, same as Ashes is doing and is the right decision .

I do not see the interest of optimizing the game for low-cost systems like something good, a DX12 game that faces the future with the latest technology thinking in systems with 8 years old will alow lag games on multiplyer, its the fact we have to understant.

In faf to many New Players have old systems,making players with good systems baned them from multiplayers games because they just kill all the fun.

No one buy GTA 5 or Tomb raider 2016  or Project Cars or any other latest game this last 3 years if they dont have a decent PC configuration  and honestly  any actual gamer must have at least I5 and a graphic card  that alowed run the last 2 years games with medium settings.

I understand the wy , but its not worth the engineers time ,when they can work in multiplayer performance like:

• Background Applications and Running Processes.
• Server Latency.
• Optimize Router Settings and Environment.
• Client Rate setting to see how many packets the game server sends to your machine to keep it synchronized

All the rest i see Ashes has the best RTS to be to play and work , this game its just daam good, when you start understand all the process is done and will be done .

No one here will see any other team doing, what Ashes team is doing in a RTS game.

Let's be honest, Ashes already has the high-end nailed, so why wouldn't they look lower? As it stands, I have a pair of massively overclocked R9 280Xs (1300core/1850mem) yet the game rarely hits 30FPS with any kind of settings at 1080p. Now, I'm not overly concerned, game doesn't have to look amazing for me to enjoy it, but it also means there's literally no point in me buying this for my younger brother, as he'll be playing a slideshow. I also generally don't see the derision to people with lower-end hardware, the FAF community is awesome.

Assuming everyone should be rocking GT1080s or Fury Xs is exactly why most people have no interest in joining the PC community. If someone with lower-end hardware wants to enjoy the same game as me, that's a good thing, I want them to.

Wow, so that's pretty belligerent. I won't speak for everyone, but I dislike playing with others, most of them are whiners, cheaters, rude, disruptive or some combination thereof. So you're not going to get someone like me on to multiplayer, period. I'm enjoying the hell out of Ashes though. But I guess it's not a sensible use of my leisure time. If only I'd been playing multiplayer, then it would've been meaningful!

Yes, obviously they only have so much manpower, but I'd say most of the previous updates to the game have been for the multiplayer community, so it's not like they've been neglected. In fact, I can really only think of the one change for singleplayer so far (The difficulty adjustments for the campaign). The rest have all been balance, ladders, matchmaking and the like.

I'm also not sure why you'd think that a minority group would be the primary thing spurring sales. Yes, you will get the occasional person who will either buy for a friend or convince them to buy so they can play mutliplayer, but they're not enough to drive things forward, and likely account for far less than the normal 95% who are simply haven't got around to buying the game.

I suspect more customers will pick more than doubling the number of players per map than having a replay option first.  The engineers had to pick which to work on first. 

I should also point out that Supreme Commander and FA were not financially successful. Focusing on improving performance is what let us increase the player count which has the side effect of reducing the hardware requirements.

For instance, decreasing memory use lets us have bigger maps but also means that smaller maps can be played on lower end systems.  We're not spending engineering resources lowering hardware requirements for the sake of hardware requirements. Instead, we're focusing on adding more features without increasing the hardware requirements which, as a side-effect, lowers the hardware requirements for those who aren't using those features.

My brother has a single 7970 and plays on High settings at around 40FPS I believe, looks good and is very playable.

Total rubbish. I am pretty active in Ashes MP and haven't come cross anyone who could be labeled with those terms. What you say may be true of some MP communities but it is not true of Ashes. Nothing wrong with only playing SP but smearing what you don't know is not helpful to anyone.

I am not entirely sure all the low end optimizing is worth it, though I am not against it. I agree the supported screen resolution could be expanded. Quad core CPUs have been out for 10 years. I know some have played Ashes on i3s and didn't have a problem, though I don't know the scale of their gaming. I guess this can have a positive knock on effect as if it can work on two cores then it should then work even better on 4 cores which will be important when you have up to 16 players on huge maps. Going for less than 2 Gig of VRAM, again I guess it ultimately may benefit everyone up the chain but 2GB is the new minimum now and 2GB GPU cards go back quite a few years now. Perhaps you're are going for a more global market where people play the game on older equipment...my advice on that is get more languages supported! Russian first I'd say, then Spanish and Chinese etc. And probably best use actors, the German guy sounds bad.

I kinda think the devs want to turn this game into Sins, which would be odd as Sins already exists and they have essentially said the sequel is in the making but is some years off.

Anyway, very much looking forward to the expansion and will be day 1 buy from me. I think replay is coming then right? I kind of take the comment above that the replay feature was delayed until the expansion because of chasing those optimisations goals rather than it coming even later still.

Edit. Wrote this before seeing Frogboys replay above. Looks like replays now not coming with 1.5

My english is fuzzy, I'm confused. Did the the replays got delayed until the expansion or are they delayed to an undetermined time?

Looks like the latter, I think.

Ok that dissappointing. The roadmap on the steam forum needs to be updated. It's still listing the replays for september and the expansion is priced at $9.99 for the owners at the time of release when it is for all owners.

Looking forward to the new defensive buildings!  Since, we have lightning weapons.. hopefully we can get lightning towers like in C&C

Where's the link to update... I can't find it!

I'll have to ask what is is he's got for settings then. As it is, I have absolutely no MSAA/FXAA, and most settings between medium and high. I might see 40FPS at the start of a match, or zoomed very far in, but once I've got a decent size going it'll slow to under 30FPS. Only other thing I could think of would be if he's running DX12 (I'm not).

Right, and that's all well and good - I'm one of those who hasn't played Ashes multiplayer, so they could actually be the nicest people for all I know - but overwhelmingly, multiplayer communities are full of toxic individuals. You are correct though, I should specify, that was not aimed at Ashes' community, just, games in general. My apologies.

Right, but like the fellow said, the optimization has a trickle-up effect. Sure, 2GB cards are quite weak by today's standards, and I expect the game won't exactly look or perform amazing for those individuals. However, is also means the previous bare-minimum is no longer bare minimum. It means the guy who had mid-range hardware now has fairly good cards, and the guys who had top-end cards might be able to squeeze some more frames, or better effects out of them. It is universally a positive, bottom to top.

Last week he upgraded to 4k and a Fury and his wife got the 7970'OC so I can't tell you that easily now. His framerate highs didn't go up with dx12 but his lows did improve. What do you get on High pre-set benchmark? You can compare yours to those others with the same card through the metaverse tab above.

The dev either wrote his reply while I was writing mine, or I hadn't refreshed recently enough so I didn't see it until I'd posted mine (making mine largely irrelevant I admit). After reading the devs response I actually feel my speculation about it having a knock on effect up the chain was about right, so I certainly don't disagree with you, though its nice to see the angle the devs tackled the issue from and that, as you say, everyone benefits.

(generally speaking the bigger the MP community the more...toxic types you get. Currently Ashes is pretty small, which certainly has its cons, but it does seem to fit the pattern and the community is in some ways better off for it)

For sure, you have done a good deal for multiplayer and I didn't mean to sound too critical.  I just meant to point out that the percentage that play multiplayer may not be quite what it seems, and that, when you focus more on single player content (a decision I understand) you can over focus on it and be relegate multiplayer to something only a small fraction of Ashes owners play. I didn't mean to say that is what you are actually doing, it just seems like a fair concern.

Now I gotta ask, I've heard a lot of talk about the higher player counts and I have to ask....do people really want this/will they actually use that? Don't get me wrong, it's a nice option, but I feel like it's fairly hard to get a 4 player game going currently.  I also don't really know what having that many players adds to the game besides more players.  I guess what I'm getting at is that upping the player count being prioritized over replays seems, at least from a non-commercial standpoint, to be the wrong move.  Replays are how you learn rts games (streaming is not nearly as informative) and by having 16 player games without replays, it seems to me that you are multiplying the problems that come with learning how to play multiplayer. I could totally be wrong about this.

Thanks for all the work you put into this game, I just like to play the role of internet guy who interrogates everything/everyone. haha

Btw, as a heads up, the game doesn't support dx11 CF. It only officially supports 2 GPUs under DX12 mGPU support. It is quite possible that if you are trying to run the game using both cards under DX11 you are in fact hurting performance. If you aren't already it might be worth disabling one card and see how performance fairs when using just a single card.

It is possible some people were put off or waiting on larger map sizes with larger numbers of players - maybe with groups of friends - but for public custom games, it is true that even 2v2s filled quite slowly. Personally I'd much rather have replays and any RTS claiming to take its MP seriously needs replays at launch imo. I have Steam friends who gave up on the game until replays are put in. That's really my only criticism of how they've been doing things so far - and hopefully they know better as far as what the majority wants and what will bring in more players. Replays need to be priority 1 after the expansion imo though...

Church yo. I don't think you absolutely need replays at launch, but I think that a few weeks to a month is when their absence is really felt.  Homeworld DOK didn't have them for about a month for about a month after its release and I personally thought that was fine as it allowed time to play through the campaign and get the feel for multiplayer and skirmish.  It might be worth pointing out that DOK's multiplayer is unequivocally dead. Obviously, I can't pin this strictly to the (temporary) lack of replays, but the multiplayer is a actually good time...when you miraculously can harass your steam friends into playing it with you.

Conspiracy theory corner: replays in other RTS games don't just let you learn the game and analyze your room for improvement; for many games replays let you ogle unit art and otherwise appreciate the subtlety and nuance that goes on graphically while you are otherwise too preoccupied to notice it. While I think we all appreciate Ashes, I think most of us realize that unit art and unit animations is probably one of this game's biggest weaknesses. When I first started watching replays in Forged Alliance, Deserts of Kharak, and Company of Heroes, I noticed a wild attention to detail that made me appreciate the game even more; there was so much loving attention to detail that was so hard to notice.  Replays for Ashes in its current state would not have the same effect; the units, while largely serviceable, just kinda hover and shoot beams at each other. In other words, whereas in those games replays make the accentuate those games attention to detail, replays here would call attentions to Ash's relative lack of detail.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this was a major consideration on saving replays for a later date.  As it presently stands, Ashes looks much better from an isometric view than it would with the ability to zoom around with impunity.

That doesn't really make sense. People can enjoy playing the game but wouldn't be able to stomach watching it back? Replays are more about seeing what the other guy did to get an edge over you or for some it will be to watch a big battle at their leisure because they couldn't do that in the game itself. As for zooming around etc, we can do that now and in the Alpha/Beta you could zoom out further too. I don't remember anyone thinking this was in anyway detrimental to the visual/visceral experience. I think the reasons it isn't here yet are two fold; it takes a long time to add such features as they are adding new functionality from scratch with a new engine, and secondly, is because they simply have too few engineers to throw at the game tbh. I really wish it was coming though, it definitely does hurt the player experience, it stunts players growth in ranked, it limits quality exposure the game could get in places like youtube, and by the time the expansion hits a significant amount of time will have passed since the games initial release, a time when everyone was already quite reasonably calling for it. 

BTW, the actual stats are 2.57% of the player base has attempted to play the game MP at least one time.  The rest, single player only.

I'm all for MP. It's my main way to play so you don't have to worry about us cutting back on it.

However, please spare me any nonsense about how somehow that 2.57% would really be 40% if we just had had replays in at release or some other nonsense.

The reality is, outside a handful of well known strategy games, MP is very niche. It is something we'll have to build up over time. Nurture it.  But anyone suggesting that we should have diverted resources away from a higher player count to replays is not going to gain credibility here.

Lots of people like to play single player games with lots of opponents.  I myself have really enjoyed 12+ single player games.   Throw in a future diplomacy feature or two and you could get some really interesting stuff going.

1. I did not suggest more investment in multiplayer would dramatically increase the percentage of owners playing. I did suggest the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy by over focusing on that 5% (err now it's lower for some reason?) and just sort of assuming that such a turnout is just kind of the nature of the beast. It was meant to be more of an abstract concern, gosh, calm down.

2. I don't think any or at least many of us are that miffed about replays not being in on release....the fact that their inclusion keeps getting pushed back on the other hand is borderline egregious. I mean come on, just say it. I almost admire how willing you are to tell your community they are wrong, but on this matter, I think it'should clear you guys dropped the ball. Wouldn't be so bad if you just kinda said it....

3. I was suggesting that I do not see the rationale for all the focus on raising player counts, not that such a focus was ultimately bad for the game. I mean it seems that way from my vantage point, but I was wondering what the rationale was. Based on what you said about diplomacy , the rationale seems to be making this into Sins on land. This brings me to....

4. Making this games into Sins on land is a terrible idea that drains all the enthusiasm I ever had for this game. After all the angry comments that you guys weren't making Forged Alliance 2, you appear to be making a backdoor, copy and pasted sequel to a game that is, in my subjective experience, way more lame and way less deserving of a sequel. Diplomacy options in a game like this will relegate it to sperglords who want to play a 20 hr hyper bland logistics game. No thanks.

5. You have kinda irked me so imma be honest and Stardock's releases as of late have beven bumming me out. I own Gal Civ 3 and that game is inferior to 2 in every substantial  way(although we are assured it can do so much more....some day......in the future).  Ashes is increasingly looking like the same story. Rather than improving the game or improving players ability to learn it you guys have opted to focus on increasing its scale? If broaching the question of why you would do that makes me loose credibility, I mean whatever, this community has a weird measure of credibility.  All i was saying is i see no good reason to focus on this, care to explain to me how i might be wrong? If that makes me sound not credible, welp,  at least I have a credible idea how ashes and Gal Civ 3 endedays up so unfinished for so long...

To ask the question again, more directly: why are the blatant problems with the game being put on hold to address a non-problem/something that on the face of, really doesn't sound that great?