I'm a huge fan of Stardock and I'm a huge fan of the Ashes of a Singularity franchise. I'm also a huge fan the Supreme Commander games that the devs for Ashes have never hid that they got their inspiration from. I even have a Youtube channel where I actively cast Total Annihilation, the OG large scale RTS that inspired this entire epic scope genre, to this day.
This is from a Stardock post from 2019, just to demonstrate my point:
So the short version is that we aren't going to be making new expansions for Ashes of the Singularity I. There might be more DLC but the changes we want to make are a little too radical to have as an expansion. My next post will be talking about what we have in mind for the sequel so you guys can opine on it. But if you liked SupCom or TA then you will really like where we want to take the sequel.
For the record, I really like the direction they are taking Ashes of the Singularity 2 in. I think that the move from the micro-heavy, precision clicking, high APM RTS titles from the days of yore like the Starcraft series or Age of Empires have already reached their peak. This was the Golden Age of RTS, and while this used to be the most popular genre in PC gaming, it is now one of the least popular by an order of magnitude.
I do think that moving the genre in the direction of high level decision-making, planning, strategy, and out-thinking your opponent is exactly where the genre needs to go in order to have a future. There have been a slew of games recently that have attempted to recreate the formula from the RTS days of yore: Stormgate, Battles Aces, and ZeroSpace just to name a few, and these titles have been an unmitigated disaster.
To me the RTS community has spoken loud and clear: The tedious, high APM, wrist-destroying and precision clicking from RTS games of the past have largely fallen out of favor, and we need to revolutionize the genre and rely on innovation and creativity if we want this class of games to have a future.
That's why I am so happy that Stardock/Oxide HAS gone in the direction of making Ashes 2 a much more macro oriented, strategy centric, automated experience. I think this is the right direction. I think Stardock has the pulse on the RTS community with these choices, and with games like these the genre has a bright future ahead of itself.
But that's also the reason I made the post, roughly two weeks before the game is released. Ashes 2 clearly is trying to go into more of an automation and strategy centered style, emphasizing intelligence and out-maneuvering your opponent on a massive, strategic level as opposed to the traditional formula. They've made no secret about this decision, it's blatantly shown to the player on the front of the Steam store page:
Ashes of the Singularity II reimagines what real-time strategy games can be. Success is based on your skill as a strategy player not micromanagement or reflexes. This is a game that celebrates your strategic skills and rewards you for understanding that logistics, planning and terrain matter. Join us on the forums and wishlist it today.
So why am I concerned? Because for a game like Ashes to succeed, it requires committing to the formula and promises it has already made to its playerbase; in particular a focus on strategy and high level decision making over pointless micromanagement and reflexes, as mentioned in the quote above.
Yet, there are still plenty of instance in Ashes 2 where the player is expected to tediously click on tiny points of the map such as metal and radioactive deposits, placing and upgrading specific structures, and many other examples where, just like in Ashes: Escalation, the game's identity is schizophrenic, and it can't decide what it wants to be.
If you want Ashes 2 to be a strategy-centric and high level optimization title, then embrace that design philosophy. Do not force the player to tediously click on hundreds of points all over the map to manually place them when the game could easily do it for the player. Do not make the player manually place radars on tops of hills to maximum detection radius when again, the game could easily automate this for you. Do not make the player manually check each region and decide where to place the structures, defenses, and extractors when again, this could be easily automated.
There are so many examples in Ashes 2 where, despite its stated design philosophy and goals, it asks the player to engage in pointless and frustrating tedium that the very automation the game boasts should already be taking care of.
I'm not asking you to remove agency from the player. The game doesn't have to automatically build extractors or radars or base upgrades, but at the very least, give the player the ability to do this from the macro level without having to zoom all the way in and tediously click on tiny, precise spots of the map to do things that the game could easily handle with the press of a button on the keyboard.
Ashes 2 needs to embrace its identity as a next generation, strategic, and rewarding of decision making over APM title, which means I'm asking for you to reject the hybrid approach which makes the game feel like it can't quite decide what it wants to be.
When the game releases in 2 weeks, the initial Steam reviews are going to be extremely important to the game's long-term health and success. If it's released while still being plagued with the same problems that Escalation had for nearly 10 years, people are going to ask what the sequel is even for, and they're right to.
