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Published on August 30, 2017 By Jythier In Ashes Bugs and Ideas

Hey everyone.

Just started playing this and I love how streamlined everything is.  Units form into armies and they just work.  However, the streamlining also removes certain things that have been in RTS since Warcraft 2.

If I have an army with artillery I want to stay out of range with all my units from the defenses while bombarding them.  It would be nice to have an 'attack ground' or 'bombard' command that causes artillery to attack without moving everything in, particularly I've seen Zeus units moving in and attacking turrets and getting themselves blown up.

Another thing is that the engineers are micromanagement heavy.  I'm picturing a system where I can tell an engineer with one click to build extractors for a whole region.  I mean, we can group up armies, but the engineers aren't smart enough to find all the metals and build extractors on them?

And, I have to choose which extractor I want to build. 

The way the building option goes away as soon as I let go of shift is unintuitive from every other game I've played, where holding shift and clicking will cause a new building to be built but letting go doesn't cancel the construction.  When you build the last one you want, you just don't hit shift and then the construction option goes away.  I feel like that works a little better on the click front, as often I'm having to click on a building again to build a second extractor or whatever. 

Anyway, these are just thoughts and ideas, certainly not bugs.  So do with them what you will.  Dustbin if needed.  I'm not a dev so I don't know.  And it sounds like the player base is more interested in other things anyway.  Other players are still going to be faster than me, I'm only playing against Easy and Intermediate AI.

Regardless of my little ideas, the game is wonderful and the concept of armies is mind-blowingly simple and effective in allowing me to manage from a much higher level.


Comments (Page 2)
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on Sep 04, 2017

igncom1

Unit micromanagement should still be rewarded in my opinion rather then just making all of combat fully automated. It's a skill like any other.

Couple of issues with this:

1) units aren't fast enough or responsive enough to be totally microed, like in Starcraft II.

2) The game was never supposed to be about micro -- rather focused on strategy.

3) There would still be PLENTY to click, and LOTS of decisions to make... lots of decisions to change commands, move, etc.

 

I like the skills aspect of RTS too, but this is a solid idea IMHO!!!

 

 

 

on Sep 04, 2017

Bleh, nevermind.

on Sep 05, 2017

How do you even micro when things are in an army?  Do you separate your armies and select individual units to do things?

Why even bother having armies if that's the thing that you're 'supposed' to do to win?

Also, why should I have to tell my artillery to stay at range?  Shouldn't any halfway decent artilleryman KNOW THAT?

Anyway, I wouldn't mind having 'artillery strike' vs. 'attack' orders, but I'm not sure unit behavior being set by order each move would be so great.  I do like the order list thing you've come up with but I'd want it to be global rather than specific orders.  Like, a per-army setup that you can apply, or that applies automatically based on what's in the army.  All pre-game setup things, and being able to share them would be key.  It would harness the community into the building of the unit AI, as opposed to it being hardcoded in and set by a dev.  Again, play style might dictate this as well, because I'm guessing multiple command structures would be viable.

 I'm thinking it's like the setup in Final Fantasy 12 where you can set up orders for your guys... or like Gratuitous Space Battles.  One or the other.

on Nov 06, 2017

Shift-click queueing behavior makes sense as-is to me.

Condensing the extractor buildings into just one type buildable on both resource types is a reasonable simplification, but more importantly frees up UI and hotkey space.

Creating user-customizable AI army choices is probably a ton of work for little gain. There will just end up being one or two 'builds' that people settle on as the best and plug it in.

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