The Lack of total control and massive armies

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

Hey people,

first off i have to mentiont hat i do in fact like Ashes of the singularity. The idea is nice, i personally like the campaign (bit short though).
However... there are two points which i would like to adress.

1) Lack of total control

When you look at games like chess, or when you take relative modern RTS like SC2, you will soon see that units always do what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it, everything you do you can estimate how long what will take, what impact i can count with etc.

In Ashes, it can happen that you form an army, tell them to attack, and half your army heads in the opposite direction because they feel like theyre not close enough the the dreadnaught. When i tell an army to squeeze through a chokepoint, i have no chance to estimate how long it will take until it fits through it. Maybe some units decide to fly off a cliff - its just happens randomly. This utter lack of control, and me pretty much fighting the AI of my own units, is just horrible.

2) Lack of massive armies

Well this game was supposed to be all about giant armies going head first against each other, long fights that might allow me to send a second army somewhere else, and a third army maybe somewhere else, setting up forward bases etc.

Its just not there. With a decent amount of areas on the map i can have maybe 5 factories, 3 armories and 1-2 dreadlauncher (im not a fan of flying stuff), and thats just not enough. At early/alpha stages of the game all the units came out of the factories as groups of 2, 3 or 4, and now its pretty much just single units getting pumped out.

It would maybe be better if the overall speed of the fights decrease, because 1 army vs 1 army is over in like half a minute or so, but the length it takes to move armies from A to B is like 10 minutes or so. Thats just an awful relation.
Even at the last level of the campaign which took me like an hour or so, in the end i had maybe 6 armies running around, and my opponent didnt destroy any.

3,645 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

1) I agree. I think the issue is less total control and more that army AI needs to be improved.  That's something I expect to keep improving though.  

2) You can have massive armies with the right map setup, but it's not common. I believe there were hardware restrictions that caused them to have to tone that down a bit (could be wrong).  The idea of slowing down battles is interesting, I like that actually.  Would also allow you to do more tactically as armies engage. 

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Two very valid points. It has been claimed again and again that Ashes can have battles with thousands of units on the screen. And I do believe these claims. But in my own games, I've never come that far.

Battling the pathfinding AI is something I also do all of the time. Add to this the fact that there is hardly any unit feedback and it makes for a very demotivating environment. I've lost huge armies just because they took forever to squeeze through choke points and I didn't even realize it, because on top of the slow movement speed, the units just decided to take the enemy fire.

-pac

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