Thank you for the information, Ed! I didn'nt know that. Sadly, it won't be a SupCom successor...

2019 will be ending soon..
any updates on updating Ashes Engine?
Any updates at all?

Please fix the map editor, make it work, so i can go ahead and fix my old maps and create some new ones...

you made it work in Siege of Centuari, so try to fix it for Ashes, or its a lot to ask?

Whats going on with Stardock....? so quiet lately.
no ASHES 2 News?
nothing you can give us about all your awesome upcoming RTS Games?

Hope to hear from you soon.

Other projects are ahead of the Ashes sequel.

Quoting EdWood110,

reply 31

Understandable, RTS is not where the money is atm.

Well age of empires has 1.4k viewers on twitch atm (random time of day). So people like RTS's. 

I feel that with a game like Ashes that has incredibly high graphics requirements massively decreases any potential player base. So they basically shot themselves in the foot a bit. Great advertising when it was being used in all new graphic card benchmark releases, but not much translation into players.

I don't think that the RTS genre is the problem. People are hungry for a great new RTS and it's a market waiting to be exploited. FAF just had its most successful week ever and that game has been "dead" (no more developer support) for over a decade. 

The issue is that a new Forged Alliance style game has to be better than the original. Unfortunately, FA is still the measuring stick for all mass scale RTS games ever made, because it's still the best and most popular. 

So it has to improve on that formula in meaningful ways. It has to be accessible to a wider audience meaning the requirements have to be reasonable. It can't have "Stardock graphics" on launch with muddy textures and lack of unit identity forcing the player to have to squint to tell what's going on. Every unit and faction needs to look visceral and unique, even from a distance. It's not enough just to make pretty explosions from a distance and have the Juggernaut class ships be cool. ALL the units need to have that much inspiration and attention to detail. The player has to connect with his army just as he would in a zoomed in RTS. Otherwise most of your potential audience just won't be interested. If all people can see from the trailers is a Michael Bay simulator, they won't waste their time. 

If the game feels innovative and inspiring with each unit and faction having a clear and unique identity, accessible to a wider audience, it will succeed. 

Even though Supcom 2 ultimately failed, I would argue that's because it suffered from "Chris Taylor syndrome".

Taylor is infamous for making great games with a ton of potential and abandoning them within a short time. In fact, I can't think of a single project he was involved with that didn't share this fate. 

Supcom 2 was an amazing game with a ton of potential, but it was abandoned before any of its major issues are fixed. Even now, if you try to play it online, it has the worst netcoding of any modern game I've ever played. It lags and skips constantly. In larger games it's practically unplayable. 

Forged Alliance didn't have these problems. How is it that the developer went backwards with the netcoding? 

There were also a ton of design and balance issues inherent to the game. Upgraded Commander rushes with no other units were extremely hard to stop. The entire research mechanic was stupid and needed a complete revamp. The game pigeonholed you into a particular specialty (air, sea, land, structures, etc.) which hurt your options as a player tremendously. 

Again, Supcom 2 could have been an amazing game. It had all the makings of a truly great RTS. Taylor abandoned it without addressing the core issues, something he is well known for. 

My personal preference is different, I'm not sure if that's just a difference or one is more "marketable".

A big problem I see in RTS games is they (understandably) struggle to do anything innovative. 

Shooters, for example, have come from Goldeneye to Modern Warfare (or Fornite). Action adventures from Grim Fandango to Witcher 3. 

RTS games like Ashes (or SupCom) just aren't as big jumps from say C&C. (on top of lacking the more addictive elements of an RPG or looter shooter). 

I really like Ashes gameplay. It's more like chess with simpler units rather than 50 unbalanced unit varieties. But then, I wasn't looking to play Sup Com 2. 

Where I see the future, and what Ashes was doing, was removing the "actions per second" mechanic that make games like Starcraft problematic. If you can offload a lot of that to the AI, you can play more grand strategy. 

Which is why, IMO, Ashes just struggled with computing requirements (in part being of a new engine) and marketing. 

But I think it's a great game and one I keep returning too. 

 My next post will be talking about what we have in mind for the sequel so you guys can opine on it.

Were is that blogpost?