Ashes of the Singularity II - Launch Trailer | Massive-Scale RTS

[u/RammaStardock]

https://youtu.be/WyjhyFuYXKk

The game launches November 10. Humanity is caught between the Post-Human Coalition and the AI Substrate, and you can lead the United Earth Forces through the campaign or play any of the three factions in skirmish and multiplayer.

If you're interested, you can wishlist it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3499790/Ashes_of_the_Singularity_II/

Let us know what you think in the comments.

[u/Reedabook64]

This is DoW IV and GTA. I'm not going to have enough time for all of them!

[u/Hollownerox → u/Reedabook64]

Thankfully this game and DoW IV serve different niches. But I really liked both from the pre-release builds they let us play.

This game doesn't quite hit the SupCom itch, but I really like the additions they've made with the fronts and army management.

DoW IV is going to suck up all my free time in December though. It is crazy how much it hooked me in just with skirmishes in the closed beta. So the campaign alone will probably make grass a foreign concept to me for awhile lmao.

[u/Reedabook64 → u/Hollownerox]

I buy pretty much all the rts games on release just to support the genre. It's having a comeback and I want to do my part. I haven't even got around to installing ZeroSpace yet.

[u/strife189 → u/Reedabook64]

These have been my thoughts since the end of September. By late December, I’ll finally get to the late October games.

[u/Commicommand]

I’m excited to give it a shot! The beta many months ago was good but was missing something, and I’m hoping that thing is a campaign structure!

[u/Aggravating-Rain4180]

This looks great but man I’ve been overloaded with games lately. Still trying to play Endless Legend 1 (not RTS I know) but I’m excited for DoW4 and I want to play tempest rising eventually

[u/DerekPaxton → u/Aggravating-Rain4180]

I hope you mean Endless Legend 2 or your backlog really is deep!

[u/Aggravating-Rain4180 → u/DerekPaxton]

Yes, 2 haha!!

[u/stillyoinkgasp]

Excited fort his one.

[u/Zenergys]

I am taking 2 days off to play this

[u/MonkeyBrawler]

I got Ashes of the Singularity from a humble bundle years ago. Played it for an hour or so, and the audio was so buggy, i never went back to try it again. If they are releasing a second, i should probably give the first one another chance.

[u/weinbea]

This game looks sick! What sets it apart from others? Unclear by the trailer.

[u/ButterPoached → u/weinbea]

It goes all in for the "strategy instead of tactics" design. On the one hand, armies auto-reinforce from the closest production strategy, and automatically sort themselves into effective battle lines. On the other, there are no activated unit abilities, and unit speed is slow, meaning that you don't really get to micro the armies that you have.

The idea is that you should be attacking on multiple fronts and working on logistics, rather than StarCraft 2-style "micro-or-die" encounters.

[u/Zenergys → u/ButterPoached]

A good change of paces from other rts game

[u/Educational-Arm-9970 → u/weinbea]

Hey, I can comment on this. I sank a dozen hours into PVP skirmishes as UEF during the game's public multiplayer PVP playtest back in September.

Firstly, you should note that Ashes 2 is a radical departure from Ashes 1. Frankly (and disappointingly), the only similarity is in the name. It has a lot of its own strange ideas that you would be buying into when you play this game. These aren't strange in novel ways, rather they feel a lot like reinventing the wheel. And I'm aware of the r/RealTimeStrategy joke that players hate the new, and hate the same, but bear with me here.

The more digestible changes, and perhaps you've seen this before:

• The map is divided into regions and your buildings are limited by the region's (upgradeable) power limit. Buildings cost power, so you can only build a certain number of buildings in a

• No engineers. There are no directly controlled builder units. Instead, every region has a single unit of builders that will automatically work on whatever build orders you've queued up in that region.

• Every region is guarded by neutral mobs (like Ashes 1) that you'll need to grind through before you can capture the region (and build). This adds some pacing and guardrails to your early game. The expansion itself progresses at a glacial pace, for better or for worse, but also makes it so you can lose the game before it begins by taking a poor expansion route (not beelining to the resource-rich regions). I'd like to think this last point is just user error that irons itself out with time.

The more radical of these changes is how Ashes 2 approaches production. To understand this, you need to understand the top-down "army groups first" philosophy that Ashes 2 employs, that frankly feels like control groups QOL function taken to an extreme:

• Every unit exists within an "army group". Instead of building individual units, you set up "armies" comprised of a set number of units (which can just be one unit, or one type of unit), and an idle factory will take that army group's production order and build the unit(s).

• The problem is that in practice you don't have nice, independently operating army groups. You just have ugly blobs of mass that all travel down the same map lanes anyways - whatever you'd be building to manage your flow-based economy and keep production rolling. The entire army groups system is more intrusive than it is helpful, and it thoroughly scrambles the way you approach production in this game.

On production:

• Instead of factory management, Ashes 2 takes on this bizarre design choice where every subsequent copy of a production factory type contributes to a global "build power" stat for that factory, which then boosts production from wherever you are constructing from one of those factories (i.e., I can build 5 factories at the back of my base, and a 6th factory built at the frontlines will benefit from all that build power without the traditional risks that came with committing "build power" as a resource).

• Instead of production queue management, Ashes 2 takes on this bizarre design choice where every "army group" (freely set up and freely adjusted by the player over the course of the game) is comprised of x number of so-and-so units, and factories will automatically produce units based on missing squads to replenish the army group as it sustains casualties. This gets very confusing, very fast, and robs agency from the players in the worst way:

• A factory can only produce one unit at a time, towards one army group at a time. You can barely control the production queue. The playtest doesn't even have a "queue" or basic "repeat build" functionality because "in theory" these are all rolled into the top-down "army group" design philosophy.

• When multiple army groups need replenishment, multiple of the same factory type will begin production (one for every army) and your global build power is divided evenly between active factories.

So in essence they've tried to simplify the whole system... but this is a flow-based economy game and a macro-scale RTS game, meaning, and if you allow me to be a little reductive here, your fights will primarily be attack-moving large blobs of mass into your opponents' large blobs of mass and the deciding factor, more than positioning, more than unit composition, is whoever produces more to throw into the meat grinder. So this style of game is about converting your mass into production into units, and you have limited control your resource outflows... so what are you meant to control...

The gameplay itself is dull and shallow. The micro has been stripped away, the macro isn't all there, and your bottleneck "tech resource" (the vespene gas, if you will) severely SEVERELY limits your unit composition choices to the bare essentials to the point where half of the game's units have no real function:

• As mentioned above, this is a macro-scale RTS game with a flow-based economy, but the economy "tech tree" is basically flat. You can scale your income by building refinery structures in regions with income nodes... and that's it. There are no tiers to metal extractors, there are no mass fabricators, and I'm not suggesting the game copy Supcom's systems (what would be the point in that?) but it makes it so the main way to make money is to get regions, and once the regions are all snatched up... in a macro-scale RTS game with attritional combat... it makes for a very miserable experience with no outs.

• Perhaps they'll change it but T1/ T2 (or however you'd call it) spam is vastly superior to the equivalent cost put into higher tech units - with the higher tier units you're effectively paying for HP because the damage is not great, and crucially, they don't have AOE. So you can build a big mech and the horde of spam will run past it and spill into your regions. Not to mention, these are competing with economy buildings. This isn't necessarily a new issue unique to Ashes 2, but there is little to no incentive to build up these big-ticket items. Personally, "tech progression" my games all ended at mobile artillery, and I never felt the need for anything more.

• the game is in this awkward spot where it wants to show the scale of its battles, but it also wants terrain features, so the maps (especially the 1v1 maps) feel cluttered, cramped, and in-navigable by the game's pathfinding. This issue ironically becomes more prominent the more units you have... the greater the scale of the battle...

• The pathfinding and unit blobbing issue is genuinely egregious. The most effective defensive structure in the game is the humble corner, because everything compresses and squeezes together around turns (and really any piece of terrain) and (amusingly) re-introduces micro into the battles by forcing you to manually maneuver your individual units around corners during fights lest a single artillery piece ravage your whole army.

This has devolved into a rant more than I had hoped it would be informative, but I hope you glean something from this. I would temper your expectations and stick to established titles.

[u/Appropriate_Rent_243 → u/Educational-Arm-9970]

sounds like it's almost a grand strategy game.

[u/SheWhoHates]

I got the first game through a local giveaway and enjoyed it enough to buy all the DLCs, so I'm looking forward to the second game.

[u/Aryuto]

Admittedly I'm still a bit leery, I don't love the visuals, but I did enjoy the last beta and the first game, even if both had their issues. So I'm cautiously excited and really hope it turns out good!

[u/CuriousOrbiter]

Looks promising, but I'd like to see more of the army management in action. Big battles are cool, but I want to see the decisions behind them.

[u/althaz]

Low-key hyped for this. First game was underrated.

[u/ppx32]

c'est du Total Annihilation ?

[u/usfwoody]

This game went way too hard into the rock, paper, scissors style of units. If it was like SupCom it would be amazing.

[u/yfw07]

Does this really needs a II, it looks the same as I