Ashes of the Singularity is big.  I mean, really really big. 

You’re not fighting a battle. You’re fighting a war.  This is providing ample challenges from a design perspective.

Today we’d like to talk about the game setup options you guys might like. 

The Tools we have to play with

We have a lot of different resources in the game not all of which may survive to final release but give us an opportunity to try out different systems to see what we like and what we don’t like.  Below are the current ones:

• Metal. You need metal to build structures and units. Metal comes from metal deposits spread across the world that is harvested via Metal Extractors.
• Radioactives.  You need radioactives to provide local power to more advanced units and buildings. Like metal, they are spread across the world but are somewhat rarer.
• Turinium.  The overall objective of the game is to conquer a given planet. You do this by building up a critical mass of Turinium which is done by capturing Turinum generators on the map and holding them.
• Power.  Your buildings need power and buildings within a region need power. This is accomplished by capturing power generators. Power generators are what determine who controls a given region and you must have a direct line of power from a region to your base in order to get it.  You can, in essence, flank your enemy by capturing a region between a series of regions they control and their base.
• Logistics. Logistics are built as logistics arrays in your base. They now provide a ton of logistics but are very expensive (so you only rarely have to build them). They determine how many units you can build.
• Noble Gasses. (future). This resource is being contemplated to allow players to use global abilities (where the player has a set of abilities they can use on a given battle somewhere on the map).

We’ll talk a lot more in the future about the role of these different resources.  But for now, we want to focus on setup.

Total Annihilation revisited

Some of you may recall that in Total Annihilation players had a lot of control over how one set up a game to customize their experience.  We would like to do this here as well.  What you guys ultimately pick as your favorites will influence what we set as defaults.  Let’s look at setup options we’re contemplating:

1. Fast Buildup.  This option would start you off with your home region with extractors already in place, a factory and a logistics array. 
2. Pre-Built Extractors.  This option would start with all the regions having their extractors pre-built. Capturing the region would automatically turn over those resources to you rather than you having to build the extractors with your engineering first. Extractors couldn’t be destroyed.
3. Power is Logistics.  This option would make it so that you received logistics from power generators on the map and power would no longer be a resource.

Share your thoughts in the comments section.