Ashes of the Singularity: November Status Report

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2015 By Brad Wardell In Escalation Dev Journals

Greetings!

We are just about ready to release 0.64 which has a lot of small improvements to it from last week’s build as well as a pretty big new feature: The power amplifier. Your engineer can build this onto your power generators to double the resource output of a region.

Now, let’s talk about upcoming changes for the beta.

Early Game Decisions

It is important that the game provide players with multiple early game decisions that are viable. Below are some decision matrices we are working toward:

Game Start

	Cost	Pro	Con	Verdict
Use Engineers to capture region	Time	Rapidly gain resources	Not teching, not building up army, not building defenses.	Viable
Build Frigate Factory	Metal	Quick build army	Slower economic growth	Viable
Build Extractors by Nexus	Time	Slight increase in resources	Same problem with capturing region but less pay off.	Not Viable
NEW: Build Orbital Fabricator	Metal, Time	Can call down an engineer or an incursion force	Not teching, not building production, slower economic growth	Viable

Around 1:30

	Cost	Pro	Con	Verdict
Build Frigate Factory	Metal	Build up army	Not teching, weaker units	Viable
NEW: Build Cruiser Factory	Metal, Rads	Build higher quality army	Slower army build up, not teching	Viable
Build Quantum Relay	Metal, Rads, Time	Teching	Not building up production	Viable
Build Advanced Factory	Metal, Rads, Time	Get T3 out fast	Hurts economy a lot.	Not viable
NEW: Build Orbital Fabricator	Metal, Time	Get incursion force or engineer out	Not building up production or teching	Viable
NEW: Build Power amplifier	Metal, Rads, Time	Doubles region output	Not teching, not building up	Not viable on most maps

Hopefully, there will be a lot of viable strategies along with suggestions for more viable strategies. But what we want to do as designers is make sure there are multiple viable strategies that we can think of and make sure they’re balanced.