Recent reviews by Arachnid

They removed a lot of the content with the recent Beyond Light expansion. Why bother buying expansions if they'll remove the content later? Back to Warframe...

They removed a lot of the content with the recent Beyond Light expansion. Why bother buying expansions if they'll remove the content later? Back to Warframe...

Get 100 hooves. You won't regret it. But watch out for your fall damage after you accidentally launch yourself a mile in any direction after tapping 'W'.

Stupidly fun to experiment with and play around.

Also, get at least 50+ equipment chargers for endless spamming.

While I've played both pre 2.2 and post 2.2, I still enjoy the game as far as 'most' mechanics goes. The reason I do not recommend this game is because once you get to 'mid-game' or 'late game', which is maybe 15-20+ hours in, the game starts slowing down significantly.

What's the problem? The game engine doesn't properly support multi-core processing. I have an Intel i7 7700k, a 4 core cpu. 1 core is maxed out, however the other 3 cores are barely doing anything, leaving about 70% of my computer's processing power untapped. Therefore, when each civilization creates more units...armies, population, etc., it's trying to do most, if not all of it on one core.

So again, while I enjoy many of the mechanics, and while mods are...necessary...for the game to be a lot more fun (Gigastructures being a great one), I cannot recommend this game for performance reasons. As an example, right now, for 1 year to pass by, it takes about 18-19 minutes. That's 3 in-game years for each hour I'm playing. That's really slow when I'm using the fastest game speed to complete my megastructures when not in a war. I just decided to stop playing my game because it would take too much time at the current speed.

UPDATE 2: I must have forgotten what it's like to play this game. Pre-2.2, or 2.0, I was able to wage unobstructed wars for no reason and purge aliens for no reason other than the fact that they were xenos scum and had to be purified by holy flames. I remember how I used to have massive fleets, and the economy felt like it was more in the background. Enemies would actually wage war against me, and it was a challenge.

Now, I find myself spending literally 90% of my time waiting for stuff to build, then research, then build more. I can't wage war for no reason. I can't have gargantuan fleets. Frankly, I think I'm going to try out Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion again, and maybe try some of the big mods out there. I don't recall it running this badly, and if memory serves, it had better graphics, and it was most certainly more geared towards my warmongering preferences than this game, sadly.

I tried adding an extra 5 mods, one that doubles resources, another that significantly boosts alloy production (a resource needed to build ships, space stations, and mega structures). The AI waged one war against me, but never attacked, and that was it for the first 100 years of the game. The AI condeded to me without a single shot being fired. This was one notch up from Ensign, but the AI's still dumb as hell, even with extra resources.


Hopefully things will change, but the combination of the two major points above, I cannot recommend this game.

I absolutely love this game. I've played both the original, and this game, and will try to break it down a into sections.

I will be assuming you've played multiple RTS games before, and have read my original review about Ashes of the Singularity (Vanilla), so I'll jump right in.

Campaign
Fun, challenging, and definitely has some unique scenarios. Some can be frustrating at times, but overall I enjoyed the storyline despite it being a bit tropey at times, but I don't mind that stuff. Overall campaign length for me was around 8-12 hours, but that's because I tend to turtle. Playing aggressively will probably shorten this.

Multiplayer
Really fun, but expect to have your butt handed to you your first few matches if you've only fought the AI thus far. The AI is challenging to newer players, but once you can take on the Challenging AI, you can probably graduate to a human player. Even better, is if you can take on the 2nd most difficult AI (or 2 of them!) by performing a successful turtle strategy. That said, once you can do these things, you can graduate to multiplayer. People will use much different (and more deadly) strategies than the AI that puts their difficulty just below the Painful AI setting, which is an overkill cheating AI. In this, you'll need to learn to expand fast while playing defense. Unlike playing against the AI, a human can become demoralized, but so can you. Play aggressively, try out strategies, but also ask the community for help in getting better.
- Community is very friendly
- Community is small, but growing. There is a discord channel as well, so get in on that!
-Multiplayer is much more difficult than the AI, so don't get demoralized after just a few games.
- 1v1 Games tend to last around 20-35 minutes
-2v2 games tend to last closer to 45 minutes
- Support for up to 14 player games, up from 6 players in the original Ashes of the Singularity
- Does not currently take long to get into a 1v1 ranked game...about 3 minutes on average for me.
- Custom/skirmish games take much longer right now, but the games do happen, and when they do, it's a blast. We just need more people to host games and join them than is happening at the moment
- Stardock has announced plans to help bolster the multiplayer community, such as the possibilty of giving all AotS a few multiplayer only keys to give out to friends...so basically they can only play multiplayer games, but could not play single player skirmish or the campaign, but certainly helps everyone.
- lag is minimal, I cannot recall experiencing much at all.
- Crashes...it does happen on occasion, but for me, it doesn't happen often at all. I think I've only had maybe 1 or 2 crashes from a multiplayer game of AotS: Escalation. That said, I was having router problems around that time which are now fixed, so I cannot rule out it was possibly that.
- Fridays! The game devs host multiplayer games on Friday's, I want to say at around 6 PM EST.

Single Player Skirmish
Where do I begin? You can play against up to 13 other players (14 player game support!). I love the chaos, but need to upgrade my computer from my lowly 7 year old Phenom II 955 processor to something more modern, but that's my fault, not the game's. The game definitely slows down on my CPU, though frankly, my cpu just isn't cut out for most games from the past 2 years XD.
- Supports enormous army sizes of thousands of units

New units
-The new units are definitely fun for both sides. Tier 2 air units were added as well, allowing you to puncture enemy defenses more easiliy, clean up groups of enemies, and help end the game if both sides are turtling with strategic bombers. While there's still some balance issues, they're working on getting it right. They just released an opt-in update for those that want to try out the new balance (1/13/2017).
- Economy: The substrate economy is completely unhinged, so they don't need to worry about storage. That said, their units are weaker and more mobile, rely on shields instead of hp/armor regeneration, and on drones more than stuff like long range artillery. The Substrate economy has a unit called the harvester, which has low health, but you can build as many as you want and have them all stack the same region to boost a certain resource type, then if you run low, you can move all of them to a different region (or split them up however you want) to boost resources in different regions. They're very vulnerable though, so if an enemy air unit gets to them, they're all dead...fast. But they're mobile, so just like their units being more mobile than the PHC, their resource structure is more mobile as well.
-The biggest thing for me are the new defensive structures and the upgrade paths for them. Long story short, turtling is now feasible as a strategy to an extent, unlike vanilla AotS, which requires you to maintain a standing defensive army.
- Substrate defenses are a bit shorter range, but much more deadly than PHC's defenses
- PHC defenses includes a heavy artillary cannon that is very long range...so take these out fast, or your Substrate defensive line that can seemingly crush everything else will become rubble.
- Orbital nullification units now help move your army along instead of losing much of your army from an orbital bombardment ability.



Ongoing Development & Support
-Stardock has continued to meet their publically stated goals, or when there are things stalling them (such as when the lead developer got sick for a couple weeks), they disclose the issues and keep to their commitments.
-They are currently working on adding new units, to include about 3 new dreadnaughts for each faction, 3 new Juggernaughts (a T4 unit, so basically an end game unit, or a super experimental like from Supreme Commander), new orbitals, and new maps.
-Modding support: They're working on it right now, as stated on the roadmap. Delay caused by lead dev getting sick.
-Vulcan support: Working on it, as stated on the roadmap. Linux support should follow sometime after that, but is contingent on Vulcan being finished of course.
- 2 additional factions mentioned to be added in later expansions
- water units/maps planned for the future in roadmap
- Tier 4 units (Juggernaughts) are on their way. Please reference roadmap.
- I believe I heard viewing replays will be added at some point, which will be great for learning new strategies (or learning from your mistakes).

Overall impressions of current state of game
- Game is very polished
- Game is fun. Lots of explosions, colors, upgradable defenses, orbital abilities, streaming economy, thousands of units, 14 player games, decent AI, decent and still enlarging unit variety (See Ongoing Development & Support Section) army systems, strategic zoom, and multiple strategies available.
- Graphics look quite nice
- Full multi-core support for more than 4 cores (and for using more than 1 core, for that matter)
- Developers communicate openly with the community in both the Steam and Stardock forums
- Developers have met many stated goals to date from their roadmap, so I have strong belief in their ability to provide continued support.
- Community is very helpful and friendly, and Ticktoc is something of a forum anomaly (very helpful player, and always answering questions), so if the devs don't answer your questions right away, he probably will jump in.
- Music is just as great as the previous game (it's mostly the same, but has I think 4 new tracks, which I really enjoy)
- Units could be more distinctive from one to the next, but it's better than the original, and am sure it will improve

- Is the game worth full price? I believe so.
Should you get it on sale? Absolutely!
Should you get this over AotS: Vanilla? YES!
Have you read my AotS: Vanilla review? If not, please reread it for some of the more fundamental information that this review doesn't cover.

I apologize if I was too generic in certain sections, but will be happy to try and answer questions in the comments section.

I had a blast reliving the nostalgia from Savage 1 in this game. However, at this time and for the past couple months, there have been less than 10 players to at present 0 players online. ZERO. So I'm sorry to say, but you're late to the party if you're considering playing this...you'd have wanted to play the first 2 weeks after release if you wanted to have a blast. However, the game literally only lasted for 2 weeks before everyone pretty much got up and left.

So for that reason, I recommend nobody purchase this game.

I'm a bit heartbroken, and out $15, but that's just how it is. I wanted it to last longer, there's not enough FPS/RTS/RPG commander/team basebuilding hybrids out there. The only other one that comes to mind is Natural Selection 2, and that dev team still makes regular updates to the game and community, where as S2 Games has been completely silent for the past 2 1/2 months. All you need to do is look at their forum posts or their news updates for the game to give an idea of how involved they remain in this game. Their silence, if nothing else, killed the community.

Now that said, if there are any changes, I'll update my review. I found the game really fun while playing with a full house, but it's not quite as fun with fewer people.

So far, I have been really enjoying this game. It has a large variety of ships, each one with different playstyles, weapon types, defenses, and abilities.

Flight in this game is not like a flight simulator...you can move up and down, left and right, forward and backward, but you cannot 'dogfight' in the typical sense. This is not X3: Terran Conflict, Freespace 2, Freelancer, etc. This is a battle of capital ships fighting it out with the intent to destroy the enemy base. Dogfighting is for small ships. Here, you're weilding battlecruisers that are slower to move, and positioning and strategy are more important than how quickly you can outmaneuvor another person (though it is important...more so for the weaker ships that focus on support).

Gameplay was a little slow for me to learn, but once I had things down, the gameplay does get rather hectic, and it's always a blast to get a kill with less than 100 hull (hitpoints) left.

Don't worry if you don't kill someone before you die, you have a last chance to kill someone when your ship explodes. It deals a good 1000 or so damage to anything nearby, and while I barely managed to kill a reaper once, he had the final laugh when his ship exploded and wiped me out. It was a blast :D

So all in all, I'm having a great deal of fun. The community is rather supportive, and there's plenty of ships to choose from. If you don't want to spend any hard earned credits on a ship before trying it out, there is a test area you can try out every ship, and you can spawn any enemy ship type so you can see how much damage you deal against ship xyz.

Just remember...listen to your teammates, watch that mini-map, and defend your base! There's plenty of tutorials on youtube outlining the pros and cons of each ship, along with their designed playstyles. You cannot win solo, but you can certainly distract the enemy team, then warp out to safety while your team captures the other lane. This is a MOBA, but it's in space, has really nice graphics, and look forward to quite a few more hours of fun!

To begin with, I have been playing RTS games for many, many years, from Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Red Alert, and Dawn of War 1 and 2, to Supreme Commander, Forged Alliance, Supreme Commander 2, Planetary Annihilation, and most recently Ashes of the Singularity.

To begin with, this is not a tactical rts , this is a full on, large scale strategy game with thousands upon thousands of units on the battlefield.

Everyone loves pros and cons lists for quick reference, so I'll start that right now.

Pros:
1. Game engine performance is top notch, minimal pathfinding issues for thousands of units, unlike Supreme Commander where late game there are significant delays from clicking and the game being able to calculate where the units should go.
2. Gameplay is very fun, with plenty of different strategies and counters.
3. Community is friendly.
4. It's fun to level up your dreadnaught and watch it demolish armies.
5. Winning feels very satisfying, even against the AI at times...it's definitely a good AI, and they're only improving it.
6. Developer support is AMAZING. I have to have a mini-list below this just for that!
- Multiple game updates per month, sometimes adding new units
- Adding new functionality all the time
- Future plans for increasing map sizes, number of players per map (stated goal is well over 100 players on a map, and their engine is designed to be very scalable, so as new tech comes out i.e. that new 8 core cpu, it will be used)
- Transparency with plans, and very receptive to the communities suggestions on what is needed
- Did you know this game was developed with roughly 1/7th the budget of Supreme Commander?
- They have openly stated that the majority of the game's budget is for post-release development.
- I believe them on this because they have thus far been meeting every stated goal on their public timeline.
- I get answers to my questions to Stardock within the Steam forums within 24 hours or less...ususally just a few hours. Draginol never sleeps.
7. The concept of meta-units, which the game uses is different, since it treats a group of units as one unit, in a way, but it still works just fine, and I love watching the battles. Nothing quite like Substrate lasers, or seeing rockets rain down everywhere from the PHC.
8. Global chat is coming this month! Sure, it would have been nice at release, but with the budget they had for the game, I definitely understand. I don't feel burned like I did by Planetary Annihilation's initial release.
9. Global abilities are really fun to use, and are another layer of gameplay.
10. The ability to choose with that 3rd resource 'quanta' whether you want to hoard it to effectively nuke an army, upgrade your army's damage, health, radar range, resource storage, etc. is rather fun since it's just another way to outmaneuvor an opponent who may have focused too much on just regularly nuking you, but now your dreadnaughts have so much hp and damage that they can ride out the nuke, get healed quickly, then finish them.
11. I love the music...and have had the main theme stuck in my head for days at a time.
12. Games are fast paced, but slow enough that you don't have to have 100 clicks per second. The winner is the one with the best strategy overall, sometimes it will involve more clicks, sometimes less.

Cons
1. There are not as many units as I would like at release, but they're working on it, have released a couple new units already, and are on their way with 3 more over the next month, along with plans for upgradable buildings/defenses.
2. Online community isn't as large as I would like, but when I do get in on a game, it's a blast.
3. Units all look very similar, and can be a bit hard to differentiate when you're new, but they're upgrading the unit designs, and you can have a look at what they've been coming up with on the Steam and/or Stardock forums.
4. Buildings feel like they're rather flat against the terrain, but again, it's a budget thing that may be fixed with time, just like they're overhauling some unit designs, I am hopeful that they may hit up buildings at some point.
5. Everything hovers...another budget thing. Initially it bothered the heck out of me, but after a while, I kind of stopped caring, let myself enjoy the game, and now find myself picking up Forged Alliance only when I want a different style of gameplay since this game is more territory capture focused, rather than base destruction and/or assassination of one unit focused.
6. Only 2 sides, but they plan on another 2 factions later on.
7. More maps and map varieties and environments would be nice, along with more unit types (i.e. naval, walkers, etc.)

Overall, I've been having a lot of fun with this game, and regularly find myself drawn to it, the lore, the thrill of large scale warfare that I haven't felt since Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and having 4000+ units on the battlefield while still being playable. That's pretty good considering I'm still using an old AMD Phenom 2 955 3.2 GHz Quad Core that's 6 years old. I long to play this game with the graphics maxed out, etc., but it's a lot of fun, I don't find the muiltiplayer games lasting 2+ hours like in Forged Alliance (because someone is running at -6 to -9...meaning for each 9 seconds that pass in real life, the game simulation only ticks forward 1 second...so waiting 9 minutes for 1 game minute to pass, and it was never my computer, usually someone with a duel core or slower).

So if you enjoy huge strategy games from a developer that is being fully transparent, and delivering on promises for ongoing game development (with MANY of the upgrades being marked as free, you can read it on the forums, they're not hiding anything), a non-toxic player base, stable game engine, pew pew lasers, and many ways to pull off a win using different strategies and unit combinations, I strongly recomend this game.

Disclosure: I have only played this game with DX11 settings, not DX12 due to only having a Radeon 7950 at this time.