Gameplay Improvement Ideas (Updated)

Hi,

after playing Ashes now for a while with a few friends of mine I decided to post the following list I've created while playing (ordered after my own priority). It should be noted that I mostly played Command & Conquer 3 and Battle for Middleearth 2 + Edain Mod before I came to Ashes, so some ideas might be inspired from their game design decisions.

I've also got some ideas for the campaign or a tutorial and for modding features. Those will be included in seperate list below this list.

 (EDIT) behind a point means I added it at some later point to the list.

To begin with: Great Game.

1.  Give teammates control over a region.
   1.  This is quite usefull when you play a custom multiplayer match with 6 people or so and accidentally capture a region important to your teammate because you tried to help him hold the region against an enemys attack.
2. Dead players can switch to observer mode.
   1. A few days ago a one teammate (who is quite new to Ashes) lost the match and he couldn't spectate the match afterwards, thus he had to wait all the time until the match was over in order to join again. This is quite annoying if the match should take longer (like a few hours). In the end he decided to played some other Games while he waited for us to finish the match. 
3. Give teammates resources.
   1. It would be nice to be able to give teammates resources when they are in need of them and you can spare a few for some time.
   2. Could be achieved by either removing them from your own storage or by giving them over time (with an option to cancel it when you should need them again before everything is transfered), for example you say you want to give your teammate 100 Quanta over a time of 1 minute or 5 minutes and then it would just work the same way like when a unit or an building is build.
4. Hide enemy players terrain from the Mini-Map/Update Mini-Map only when the region is currently visible through a scout or something like this.
   1. I would really like to have this kind of feature or have it as an option available for custom matches as it would make it more unpredictable where battles will appear and how strong the enemy might be, what unit types he builds and all of that stuff.
5. Multiplayer over LAN
   1. In my opinion it's quite nice to have the option to play with friends over LAN instead of online (in case of servers get shut down or someone screwed up the network settings again with all those different devices like multiply Switches and routers etc.).
6. Change AI behavior of orbital abilities and aircraft (EDIT)
   1. Why? Well... currently playing against AI we experienced that at some point you just have to build in each region you capture a few air defenses and most important a orbital jammer or the region is lost as soon as your units move to the next one. This can be pretty annoying as it just slows down the Game because you always have to wait for all those buildings to be finished before you can move on. The AI also seems to like aircraft as it always spams them at us (Challaging AI and higher).
7. Add Juggernaut defensive structures (EDIT)
   1. Currently there seems to be no real way to deal with juggernauts other than having yourself a juggernaut which means that when you lost your juggernaut and can't build a new one fast enough the game is most likely over for you if you don't have a huge wall of defenses like everywhere.
   2. In one match today two enemy juggernauts which are efficient against buildings just rushed through my entire base and 5 regions and destroyed everything on there way. My defenses had been upgraded and could survive one to two (not all regions, but the ones nearer to my base) dreadnoughts attacking at the same time. All of those defenses had no chance against the two juggernauts and thus I lost the match within a few minutes.
8. Remove units from build queue of an army
   1. Why? Well, it gets quite annoying and costs resources if you order units to your army, but accidentally click on the wrong button as there is currently no option available in the Game to stop them from beeing produced other then searching through all your 30 factories to find the one which builds the unit right now or will build it in the future...
9. Give warnings to a player when his buildings are under attack.
   1. I guess everyone nows the situation where you loose because important buildings (except for the Nexus) have been destroyed without you noticing it. (like resource producing buildings through an air strike).
10. UI-redesign (for reasons see here: https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/485781/ui-redesign)
11. Allow players to see all selected units (for example a UI which shows: 41 medics, 2 dreadnoughts etc. are selected)
    1. Note: I'm NOT talking about how many units are in an army which you selected! I'm talking about selected units in general, for example selecting non-army units or an army + units which aren't in any army or multiply armies at the same time. When doing this I would like to know how many and what units I've selected.
12. Let the player choose which factory builds units for which army and which army should be prioritized
    1. It get's quite frustrating when you have to cancel the entire build queue just to get new units to the battlefield. When you have one army it's not a huge problem, but when you have 8 armies who all want to have their units and one army is under attack and thus needs the units immedialty and not after all other 7 armies got their units you can't give this one army the priority right now.
    2. It is also frustrating when half your newly produced army dies because it tries to get to your army which ordered those units but enemy territory is in-between those two locations. This happened quite often to me that the factory just besides the army produces the units all fine for this army but I couldn't stop the factory which lay further away between enemy territory to not build units for my army as they would die (and did die) before they could reach the main host.
13. Ability for dropped players to re-join a game.
    1. Might be nice if for one player Ashes crashes or the internet connection is interrupted. Happened to me a few times while playing ranked matches.
14. Acquisition of allied assets when a player drops
    1. Automatically aquire all assets (units, buildings etc.) of an teammate when he permanently won't re-join, for example when the Game would have a time limit that players can re-join a match after their game crashed or internet connection was lost of about 5 minutes and when those 5 minutes are over or the player was kicked by the rest of the players or replaced through some AI a player of the same team could get all the regions and units and buildings in order to still provide a fair match.
15. Allow to only select air or ground units.
    1. Just try to only select 20 small air units which fly over a huge army of yours. Good luck trying.
16. Team colours instead of player colours as an option
    1. Allow for an option to view team colours instead of the colours of every individual player as it can get quite a mess to know which units are from your team when in the middle of the map 10 players are fighting with all their armies.
17. Click and hold the mouse button to build multiple structures
    1. Like in the Anno series, you click to place one building there and hold the mouse button pressed while moving the mouse. The game will automatically place buildings in the direction or area of your moved mouse from the first placed buildings. Quite usefull for building like 30 Quantum Relays. See here for a demonstration video showcasing what I mean: https://youtu.be/34eeiZTsUyo?t=10m15s 
18. Fully rebindable hotkeys
19. Army formations
    1. Let's have some army formations, I mean it's a strategy game. Some formations like a long line of units (like 3 units in the front and in that formation multiply rows of units behind) would also help to navigate large armies through small space.
20. Does really the entire army has to turn around when retreating??
    1. Currently when a large army of mine with a dreadnought has to retreat as the dreadnought took a lot of damage I can rather let the entire army die then order a retreat as ordering a retreat would most likely cost me anyway the dreadnought and half the army.
21. More variety for map textures
    1. This would allow for the maps to look more different from each other.
22. Ruins on the map
    1. This would if done correctly allow for the scale of the Game to come to someones mind. For me it always feels like the units are extremly small until I zoom really closely in to see the trees which from distance look more like grass.
23. AI juggernauts
    1. Does the AI even know what juggernauts are? I never saw them build even one of them (tested on Beginner, Easy and Challaging). This also occured to me when having build like 3 of them. The match is always over before the AI starts building them if it ever does.
24. Prevent armies from beeing formed on mouse click.
    1. It really happens a lot when you don't want it to happen, even with engineers!
25. Prevent artillery units from moving closer to target instead of utilising max range
26. Add an option for armies which order new units to NOT utilize all factories...
27. Auto-assign units to a control group while they are still beeing build. (Just take a look at Starcraft 2)
28. Allow units to be removed from a control group without disbanding and re-creating the entire control group. (Same goes for armies!) (Just take a look at Starcraft 2)
29. Allow super-control groups: Like forming a huge control group out of multiply other control groups WITHOUT disbanding the already existing control groups to gain more control while attacking while having an easy option to move multiply control groups at the same time. (Just take a look at Starcraft 2)
30. Cancel the building of a single building when having a build queue without having to start setting the queue up all over again.
31. Add an option to show all engineers on strategic overview map or mini-map
    1. On large maps with lots of engineers you always loose them. You can click through each idle one, but this way you never know which one is at the closet point to where you want your buildings to be placed.
32. Stop medics rushing into enemy fire.
33. Allow player to remove specific unit or unit type from army without abandoning the entire army.
34. Not all buttons are greyed out when they aren't supposed to work
    1. for example "Form Army" for air units or when forming an army while having only two dreadnoughts/juggernauts selected
35. Let artillery units fire sit on a specific point and fire always on a specific location/enemy target
36. Allow clicking out of the invite player panel in a lobby to close the invite panel.
37. Steam Streaming FPS drop? (EDIT)
    1. When someone is watching your Game via Steam the Game shouldn't feel like 30fps as that is what steam uses for streaming. I can always feel a fps drop when someone starts watching. 

Campaign and Tutorial/Documentation:

• Re-balance the campaign.
  • For example the first campaign got quite un-balanced due to so many updates.
• Remove escalation tec tree from normal campaign.
  • The normal campaign doesn't even have tutorial for them so how am I supposed to know that the enemy will come with heavy aircraft when I don't know that heavy aircraft existed because no one told me as the Game doesn't tell you the escalation tec tree in the normal campaign. I even lost some matches because of such things until I started to play skimrish against Beginner AI to read through all those escalation tec tree stuff so I'm prepared when it happens the next time in the normal campaign.
• New and better and not so boring campaign tutorials.
  • Isn't it boring to just have someone tell you "Oh yeah, you got this new unit. It's great against this unit.".
• Don't play the same opening of the campaign 10 times in a row when a player failed 10 times in a row.
  • This just leads to high APM in the beginning because of pressing space (oh yeah, found it out at random because the Game didn't told me via a tutorial nor via some in-game documentation like Civilisation has nor is there an option to see all keyboard and mouse controls and what they do)
• Don't always draw the players attention with a camera move away from what he/she is doing to introduce new enemy's or objectives in the campaign to the player.
• The moment when you want to order your unit to attack the enemy or to build a building but instead your camera is dragged away from what you were doing to show you there are radioactives or to instroduce you to your new enemy.
• When placing buildings the selected building is even dragged away with the camera.
• Multiple Ping types for team communication
• Quite nice to have when you want to inform your team mates about different stuff.
• Add information somewhere to let new players now this feature exists instead of having them to figure it out randomly while playing.
• Wait, there is a team chat?
  • No one told me...
• Campaign: Defend your Base gets never accomplished (UI), even when you win the match.
• https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/486698/265-campaigns-review-and-some-additional-comments  (EDIT)
• Mac sometimes seems to be doing nothing interesint in the Campaign: Imminet Crisis Hunter on Hard - I've got 16k military strength, the other AI got 20k military strength and the enemy got 10k military strength while Mac was sitting there with 2k military strength and 1/3 or 1/4 of the map doing nothing except for sometimes sending in some Brutes or using orbital abilities to spawn defenses.  (EDIT)

Modding:

• Allow players with the same mods/custom maps to play in Multiplayer (like in custom matches). Quite nice when you want to play the same mod you just created with a few friends.
• Allow for custom units to be added to the Game with custom 3d models (created in Blender for example and then exported to obj or fbx etc.) and custom textures.
• Allow custom textures for custom maps.
• Allow for custom buildings to be added. Includes buildings like ruins as map decoration or destroyable map decoration.
• Allow for unit speed to be altered.

Multiplayer:

• MP ranked ladder shouldn't put you up and down because you won or lost one match (luck?)
• MP ranked ladder should only allow you to play against players which are as good as you are

Bugs:

• Press space to open the region map and while doing so hold some key like WASD or the arrow keys and see what happens when you stop pressing any key. You move towards that specific direction and can't stop it. A fix for this may be to press space again to open the map and click somewhere on the map with your mouse, thought I haven't tested if this fix solves the problem always.

For the multiplayer stuff, I have to admit that it's been quite a while since my last ranked play at a time where none of my friends owned this Game.

Also quite nice modding guide there.

Keep up the good work and produce more content for this nice Game. Would be nice to see some or all of these ideas in-game.

AshBuild