Thoughts on 2.5

Good feedback.

With regards to the end game, what would be an ideal end game?

That's a tough question but I feel like the ideal endgame for me is to up the scale not necessarily in the quality of units but in quantity of units. I like commanding large armies and forces, ones large enough that splitting them up across multiple fronts doesn't feel like a risk if they enemy tries to barrel all of their forces down a single avenue.

But I'm not sure if I am really expressing what I think correctly or if I have some wired mixed, as it is easy to criticise but harder to give good constructive comments in return. I would just hate to see a game where the player simply rushes of the unit tiers and then gets stuck only using a smaller section of units by the end of the game. That's how it felt in supreme commander and planetary annihilation, you get to the next tier of units and completely replace the ones that came before. As for Ashes frigate-cruiser-dreadnought balance, I think it's quite nice. Not perfect, but nice. More then once have I taken down dreadnoughts with a wave of frigates and other times I have held the line with the right kinds of cruisers against the odds. But I feel that the trend with these juggernauts and any other higher tiers that the current balance might not be enough to keep the earlier tiers of units useful throughout a game.

I occasionally like to play a game where I go for mass dreads but if that all you build at the end of every game you aren't exactly building large armies any more, just 20 big units. 20 cool looking units, but still just 20. Which kinda shrinks the games scale in my opinion.

I might be rambling here... I might even be out of my mind as I don't always agree on issues that many of the games players might want to see, but so long as you can get what I am saying, agree or disagree, then I thank you for your time. Reading this wall of text. I dunno.  

Thanks for the feedback. Are you able to send your save game where you had the AI getting stuck issue?

You can email it to [email protected]

I might be able to get a replay of the last game I played with the issue, but I don't have a save game to my knowledge as I don't tend to save in the middle of a skirmish.

I might also be able to get a youtube vid tomorrow that shows the AI getting stuck if that will suffice.

You may have an auto save though.

Okay, thanks.

Hi guys!

Its been a while since i gave any feedback on ashes. Having tested the new 2.5 patch i have come up with a few suggestions and feedback:

1. I really liked the remake of the vision (radar) system. But some units and army AI still behaves like in old system. The main issue i have is artillery units (artemis, destroyers) stay behind army and contribute very little in sieging up enemy defence lines. On the other hand middle and close range units get destroyed by the defences. 

2. Dreadnought position in army is very delicate thing atm. PHC artillery one works pretty well, on the other hand most of sub/other phc dreads go all ham in front of an attack eating all the dps thay can get and going down pretty easy, while smaller units do nothing to assist dread. I think we need army formation options to deal with this issue. A few of them would be enough: Artillery stance, when artillery units go forward and other units cover them while staying somewhat behind, Attack stance, when tanky low range units go in front, Defensive stance or retreating stance, when units cover the retreat of most usefull units like charon/dreads/juggs and so on. 

3. Air units need some work imo. They are either too powerfull when they can destroy so much of your economy even if you invest in some AA turrets, or they are useless if you have a few upgraded AA units or turrets. I dont actually have an answer to this issue. 

4. Army AI. i just dont get it why always healer units go in front of more tanky units and get shot down instantly (caregivers are champs in suicide sports). I think that has something to do with an issue i stated in p.2. We need army formations. 

5. Mid/late game transition. Early game is solid atm, you build your base, you expand, you make frigates/cruisers, get a few armies up and do some agression on the enemy. But once you get to the dread phase of the game, thats when it gets nasty. You actually cant get a few dreads on the same army so that they work together. It might has something to do with the buffs they are providing for their armies. But in a super late game we need to be able to make armies of dreads with cruiser support. Maybe we need an option to turn a single dread in to a commanding one, which provides buffs for the army and others are countes just as regular units. 

6.Frigates. They only have value in early game while expanding. I think there should be an option to make an army of frigates and request reinforcements without any cruisers in army, to make them semi viable mid/late game via building hundreds of frigates and while abusing their high speed roam (raid) enemies weakly defended points. Now if we get a cruiser in an army, the whole army slows down. 

7.AI. Substrate AI performs quite nice, it can provide pressure, raid your points, get some air agression and build up quite an economy. PHC AI is underperforming a lot atm. It seems like PHC challenging AI plays like easy Substrate AI. I think it needs to be updated.

I would also like to thank all of you guys who made ashes one of the best RTS on the market right now, those balance fixes and system remakes are well balanced and well designed. 

As someone who absolutely LOVES the expanded unit tiers, perhaps it would help to have a game option to limit tiers, akin to what Supreme Commander had (You could cap things at 1, 2 or 3, or no cap). That way if someone doesn't want to watch Juggernauts and Dreadnaughts absolutely wipe the floor with everything else, they can simply cut off the technological level where they like.

Juggs can already be turned off, not sure about Dreads.