Sliders. Knobs. Checkboxes. Such is the spread-sheet roots of strategy games. Let's fix that.

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Overview

Years ago, Random House asked me to write a book around the Elemental universe.  As a first time author, I was assigned an editor, Dave Stern, who soon became a good friend of mine.

Over the course of writing the book, now sold on Amazon, Dave and I would go back and forth on the story along with Random House's requests to ensure that the book was commercially successful.  I will be the first to admit that my vision of the story may not have been as commercial viable as theirs.  After all, the editorial team assigned to me was the same team managing the Game of Thrones series who, fortunately for me, had a lot of extra time to spend with me due to a Dance with Dragons being late.

The end result, however, is that what is on store shelves is dramatically different from the original story I wrote.

Thus, for the first time, I will share with you the original draft of the book with you. 

I hope you enjoy it.

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Stardock Magazine: February 2017

by Brad Wardell

## Contents ##

1. Editorial
2. Object Desktop status report
3. Merging the Singularity
4. Handles: Your oldest enemy
5. Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade
6. Why do video games look...like video games?

## Feedback ##

The feedback there is here. You can follow me on Twitter here.  I will also be at GDC.

## Editorial ##

Sorry about missing January’s issue.  I'm getting older and slower.  I recently had to get reading glasses which I am wearing now to type this to you.

Most of January was spent doing business planning for 2017 which, at Stardock, is always an interesting challenge as I have what amounts to two management teams: One for the games and one for the software.

As some of you know, most of Stardock’s income comes from the software.  Over the years, the corporate sales side of the business has sort of taken priority over the consumer side.  A big reason for that is the way the market has changed.  Back in the 90s, we sold Object Desktop for OS/2 for $89.95 per box (and it came in a box with floppies).  Now, software routinely sells for $5.  Thus, a lot of the updates to our consumer facing software has come thanks to sales to corporate customers.

This year, we are working on two new products for Object Desktop.  One involves virtual desktops and the other…well it does not involve virtual desktops.   We are also planning our update to WinCustomize.com which is badly in need of a refresh.

On the game side, we have two studios working on four games: Star Control: Origins, Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, Ashes of the Singularity and an unannounced new game for this Fall.

Needless to say, it’s going to be a busy year.

## Object Desktop Status Report ##

A lot of the work on Object Desktop continues behind the scenes as we work to ensure things aren’t getting broken by the Windows 10 Insider builds. 

Besides the two new products we plan to add to Object Desktop this year, we have major updates planned for DeskScapes and SkinStudio planned.  We really want to see desktop customization start to make a comeback once people start to standardize on Windows 10.

->>www.objectdesktop.com

## Merging the Singularity ##

Early last year, Stardock released its much anticipated next-generation real-time-strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity.  The sales were much stronger than anticipated and a lot of users requested features that would greatly increase the depth of the game.  Since we didn’t want the base game to become too complex, we decided to create a separate program: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

Historically, creating multiple SCUs for different user bases has worked very well for us.  Keep the standard version true to its original vision and price it for the masses and create a “Pro” version for those who want the more sophisticated one and price it higher.

However, this metaphor has not worked very well on the games side for a variety of reasons, the biggest being the nature of how PC games are distributed (either via Steam or GOG) where each SCU has its own page and forum and different SCUs can’t play with each other.

For last few months, I’ve been surveying the user base on what they think we should do and the overwhelming consensus is that we should merge the games back into a single game.  The question is: Which game? 

Weighing in development time, opportunity costs and customer goodwill we decided the best path was the one that would make the most customers happy: Merge them into Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and give everyone who bought the base game a free copy of Escalation and then give those users who have already paid to upgrade to Escalation a season pass to all the Escalation DLC.

This merging should occur soon (or may even happen by the time you read this).

While some may question the idea of giving away what amounts to millions of dollars worth of free licenses, my view comes from owning a software company for over twenty years: Happy customers equals future sales.   Long-term customer loyalty trumps short-term profits.

->>www.ashesofthesingularity.com 

## Handles: Your oldest enemy ##

If your computer is starting to run slowly, before rebooting it try checking for how many handles a given program is using.

To do this, bring up task manager (ctrl-shift-tab), go to Details and then add the Handles column.  Anything over 10,000 handles should give you pause.  The more handles a program uses, the slower it will make your PC no matter how much memory or how fast your CPU is.

## Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade ##

After a ten-year hiatus, I am back in the coding/design chair of Galactic Civilizations.  It’s good to be back.  I technically started back in November, working on what became version 1.9 and more recently 2.0 of Galactic Civilizations III.  My long-time friend and colleague, Paul Boyer, remains lead designer but my job is to get in there and start doing “my thing” to the game.

This Spring, we'll be releasing a major expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations III called Crusade.

To learn more on that, here are the DEV DIARIES:

1. DEV 1: Introducing Crusade
2. DEV 2: The Civ Builder

->>www.galciv.com

## Why do video games look...like video games? ##

Ever wondered why no matter how much they try, video games always look like video games and not...real?  And I don't mean real like uncanny valley real, I mean, they don't even look like a Pixar movie.  What's the deal?

This has to do with how game engines render out a scene.  There are a lot of different techniques used by game engines to put something on your screen.  When it comes to rendering something that is 3D (as opposed to a 2D drawn sprite for instance) how something looks is heavily influenced by how light interacts with that object in a 3D scene.  If you have heard of the term "shading" or "shaders" it means what it sounds like: how an object will be shaded from light sources.

Deferred rendering

Most games used what we call "deferred" shading and/or lighting.  The object is rendered and then the light is done in a second pass.  This is kind of like taking a picture and then putting it into Photoshop to do stuff to it (terrible analogy but you get the idea).  The advantage is that it's a lot less expensive on your CPU and graphics card to do it this way because shading is relatively expensive.

Example of a game that does this would be Dota 2.  The Unreal and Unity engines support this. 

CGI-style rendering

There is no such thing, technically, as CGI-style rendering.  But when most people think of CGI quality versus video game quality it comes down to how scenes are rendered.  RenderMan 21 is probably the best known package for handling movie production.  Specifically, they tend to use what is called REYES rendering (though more recently, they have begun moving to Monte-Carlo ray tracing but I split hairs).

Not surprisingly, the amount of computing power you need to implement Reyes rendering is far greater than deferred rendering.  Since games have to do their rendering in real-time, deferred is generally preferable but at the cost that no matter how much effort an artist puts in, most people can tell the difference between deferred (when shadows and lighting are applied afterwards) versus when the lighting and shadowing are inherently part of the render.

The good news is that we are starting to reach the point where we can do REYES.  For example, Oxide's Nitrous engine, which Stardock uses on its newer games, supports Object Space Lighting.  Its strength is that it handles the shading before the scene is put together as pixels.  This way, the shadows are inherently part of the scene and not applied afterwards.  The main downside to this is that it requires a lot of GPU memory and of course, high end video cards.

But for now, the reason your game doesn't look "real" or even like movie quality CGI has to do with when shadowing (shading) is being applied.

Haven't sent this out yet...

But feel free to chat with me here.

If all goes according to plan, most, if not all, Ashes players will have Escalation in the next few days.

Why are we expanding the criteria?

Simply put: While people like Ashes of the Singularity, the overwhelming message is that the community needs to be merged together.

We originally planned to allow players to play MP against each other but as time has gone on, it has become increasingly apparent that this would have both technical and fairness issues (i.e. do Ashes players get strategic zoom in MP vs. Escalation players? How much work is it to let players of SCU 1 play the players of SCU 2?).

And even if we meet those challenges, what about multiples forums on Steam and GOG that split the community? What about modding?

Since we are in this for the long-run, the best way is to just merge all players bases together into a single player base with Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for everyone and then we can create a "simpler" in-game game mode.

We will have more information soon on this.  I want to thank everyone for sharing their ideas and feedback on the various options that have been presented.  I realize that some people will be pleasantly surprised to see their suggestions actually utilized by a game company, but sometimes the best ideas come from without.

Callum recommended changes implemented:

1. Hermes sight increased from 600 to 750
2. Hermes Radar range increased from 1000 to 1200
3. Archer Logistics cost increased from 1 to 2
4. Medic Heal rate lowered to 66% of its current value
5. Medic Logistics cost Increase from 1 to 3
6. Martyr Shields increased from 60 to 105
7. Martyr Logistics cost reduced from 4 to 2
8. Capacitor Energy per second regeneration increased from 1 to 4
9. Capacitor Shields reduced from 500 to 400
10. Masochist Logistics cost increased from 2 to 5
11. Athena Main gun damage reduced by 10%
12. Athena Radioactives cost increased from 30 to 60
13. Athena Secondary weapons damage halved
14. Mauler Logistics cost increased from 4 to 7
15. Mauler Radioactives cost lowered from 80 to 60
16. Mauler Metal cost reduced from 380 to 350
17. Mauler Armour Penetration removed
18. Destructor Main weapon damage increased by 30%
19. Caregiver Logistics cost reduced from 30 to 10
20. Caregiver Heal rate increased by 400%
21. Apollo Anti-Air damage increased by 33%
22. Apollo Logistics cost increased from 3 to 5
23. Overmind Metals cost increased from 2000 to 3000 (2400 after global reduction)
24. Overmind Radioactives cost reduced from 5000 to 3000 (2400 after global reduction)
25. Overmind Secondary weapon damage doubled
26. Overmind Now spawns 5 Drone Swarms instead of 3.
27. Retributor Primary weapon damage increased by 150%
28. Retributor Primary weapon minimum range removed
29. Retributor Secondary weapon damage Quadrupled
30. Prometheus main weapon penetrates all armor
31. Substrate Dominator requires Orbital Archive [REQUIRES AI UPDATE FOR THIS TO WORK]
32. Substrate Punisher Requires Gateway [REQUIRES AI UPDATE FOR THIS TO WORK]
33. Furies and Dominator now have 15% armour Penetration
34. Hades Metal cost decreased from 270 to 250
35. Hades Radioactives cost decreased from 330 to 300
36. Strategic Bomber Armour lowered from 16 to 14 (80% damage reduction to 70%)
37. Strategic Bomber Health increased from 4800 to 6600 (This is still a nerf because of armour)
38. Strategic Bomber Logististics cost lowered from 100 to 80 (Same as Harbinger)
39. PHC Pan (scout air) health increased
40. Instigator Health tripled
41. Instigator Metal cost lowered from 800 to 500
42. Instigator Logistics cost lowered from 20 to 1
43. Searcher Shields increased from 300 to 1400
44. Air Marauder Damage increased by 50%
45. Air Marauder Logistics cost increased from 4 to 15
46. Rampager Damage increased by 50%
47. Rampager Health and shields doubled
48. Rampager Logistics cost reduced from 30 to 15
49. Rampager Rainmaker range increased from 400 to 800 (to match other weapon)
50. Advanced Sky Factory only requires Air Factory Now only requires Air Factory [REQUIRES AI UPDATE]
51. Aviary Now only requires Assembly and Quantum Relay [REQUIRES AI UPDATE]
52. Sensor post radius default increased from 1800 to 2500
53. Sensor post Radioactives cost increased from 20 to 80
54. Sensor post health reduced
55. Listening post health reduced
56. PHX Nexus armor reduced to 18 (90% damage mitigation)
57. Smarties health and damage increased
58. Barrager Armor reduced, weapon damage increased
59. Artillery Post projecile speed greatly lowered
60. Artillery Post accuracy reduced
61. Artillery Post Range lowered from 3500 to 3000
62. Artillery Post Damaged lowered from 300 to 250
63. Drone Bay Metal cost increased from 240 to 350
64. Repair Bay Metal cost increased from 140 to 300
65. Annihilator Damage reduced by 33%
66. Annihilator Metal cost increased from 180 to 200
67. Heavy Annihlator Damage reduced by 33%
68. HA Metal cost increased from 240 to 300
69. Disruptor Health Reduced from 4000 to 3000
70. Sky Ender Damage increased by 600%
71. Sky Ender Now has 20% armour piercing
72. Sky Ender Ranged increased from 1500 to 1800
73. Sky Ender AOE reduced from 150 to 120
74. Star Burst Damage reduced from 200 to 50
75. Constable Health increased from 900 to 1200
76. Falcon Flak Gun Health increased from 900 to 2700
77. Falcon Flak Gun Armour increased to give 50% damage reduction
78. Falcon Flak Gun Damage output increased to 240%
79. Falcon Flak Gun Rate of fire increased to 133%
80. Falcon Flak Gun Cost increased from 150/30 to 470/80
81. Air Eliminator Armour reduced from 20 to 12 (95% to 60% damage reduction)
82. Air Eliminator Health increased from 1500 to 4000
83. Sentinel Health reduced from 4500 to 3500
84. Oblivion Gun Armour reduced from 20 to 12 (95% to 60% damage reduction)
85. Oblivion Gun Health increased from 3000 to 4000
86. Substrate Pulverizer gun Shields reduced from 4000 to 2500
87. Exterminator Turret Health reduced from 6000 to 3000
88. Regenerator Tech requirements moved from Subspace Streamer to Energy Modular [REQUIRES AI CHANGE TO WORK]
89. Call Engineer Quanta cost increased from 30 to 50
90. EMP Quanta cost increased from 100 to 150
91. EMP Shield damage reduced from 10000 to 2000

Want to find other players to play with in Escalation?

Download the Escalation Browser. When in your system tray, it will turn green if number of eligible players grows.  You can also chat with other players who hang out as well.

Note: Steam must be running in order to use Escalation Browser or you will get a "SteamAPI failed to init" error.

Greetings!

I’d like to introduce you to Callum McCole.  You’ll be hearing about him a lot in the coming months as I have asked him to take an ever great role in helping me on design elements of Ashes of the Singularity.  He runs the popular RTS YouTube channel, General’s Gentlemen.

As an RTS player of many years, I have often lamented when game developers fail to make the most use of the RTS community when it comes to design and balance that can be helpful both for the expert players as well as newcomers.  I have seen people make this wish so often that I suspect many of you will be surprised that we have fulfilled that wish.

The upcoming version 2.1 of Escalation will be the first to have the beginnings of his efforts starting with the great map rebalance.

In his own words:

Fixed Maps:

Canopus

Canopus is a 3 player map which is currently in the 1v1 map pool. It features incredibly narrow choke points with only a single path into the player's base and a small centre area with a mountain making the centre impassable. This is bad for gameplay since there’s no room for flanking or aggressive maneuvers, the game rapidly because stagnant and just about spamming defenses. The tight narrow chokepoints create problems for pathfinding and the balance is ruined by the unflankable PHC Artillery Turret.

Canopus also has a disproportionately high amount of Radioactives compared to Metal.

Changes Applied:

• Create additional routes between each peninsula to allow for more strategic diversity and flanking routes
• Reduced the size of the impassable terrain in the middle
• Added a metal relay in the middle of the outer pathways

Old: New:

Ceres

Ceres is a great map as it is, but it suffered from not having a second set of Metal deposits near the base. Adding in additional Metal deposits makes map control more strategic, which is important for a map that is so small.

Changes Applied:

• Added two metal deposits to one of the nearby empty relays

Old: New:

Deneb

Deneb is the most asymmetric map in the 1v1 map pool; while an asymetric map looks pretty and is interesting if done right, the current implementation of Deneb is imbalanced in favour of the left side due to the following issues.

1. The left side has an additional Metal relay
2. Southwards expansion on the right side is hindered by Turinium Generators.
3. The Central mountain has two attack paths onto the right side, but only one for the left.

Balance aside, Deneb has a disproportionately low amount of Radioactives compared to Metal. This limits strategic diversity and generally favours PHC who are less radioactives intensive than Substrate.

Changes Applied:

• Reworked the terrain layout in order to be more symmetrical
• Symmetrized the resource layout to be fair and balanced for both sides
• Replaced the side Turinium Generators with Radioactives
• Centralised Turinium generators to make Turinium acquisition more viable

Old: New:

Knife Fight

Knight Fight is an extremely linear map, with only a single pathway through the centre of the map from which all points are connected. This results in little strategic diversity and no room for flanking and tactical manoeuvres. Knife Fight should have additional pathways opened up along the sides with the points being connected to allow for more tactics and attack paths. The south spawn also suffers from the first two relays being further away from the Nexus than the North spawn.

Changes Applied:

• Equalised the travel time from starting locations to first two resource points
• Opened up an additional pathway on the sides of the map
• Opened up an additional pathway on the top and bottom of the map
• Connected the resources points on the sides of the map

Old: New:

Monaco

Monaco only has two pathways across the map with Starting Locations situated incredibly close to each other. This makes the map easy too easy to lock down with static defenses, while the close proximity of spawns allows for Artillery Posts to directly siege the opponent's Nexus from the safety of their own. Lastly, having two “safe” Turinium generators on each side of the middle prevents Turinium from being accumulated. 

Changes Applied:

• Moved player starting locations to map corners
• Reshuffled some of the resource layout to replicate a more standard starting location
• Created a wide Pathway in the centre of the map
• Centralised all the Turinium Generators to make acquiring Turinium more viable

Old: New:

Regulus

Having only a single attack route onto the other half of the map means static defenses easily lock down and prevent any aggression, creating a long, slow  grind to break through the enemy defenses with no potential for flanking. This inherently favours PHC, who have access to the Artillery post. Regulus needs additional pathways across the map to allow for more maneuvering.

Changes Applied:

• Created a pathway at the top and bottom of the map with an empty relay
• Moved the starting locations to map corners to account for additional pathways

Old: New:

Ulrich

Without any central Path, players can only fight each other via the sides of the map, when combined with how Ulrich is a very large map for 1v1 given its medium size, this makes the map feel very slow. Having only two attack paths on opposite ends of the map can can result in players attacking each other on opposite sides and having their armies completely avoid this other, creating a base trade situation. This is not a very fun dynamic, players should have more opportunity to move their forces around the map and be able to better respond to attacks.

Secondly, having two easily defensible Generators on each side of the map results in Turinium rarely being generated for a player.

Changes Applied:

• Created a pathway between the centre of the map
• The middle now only has a single centered Turinium Generator
• Added Metal Deposits onto one of the empty relays near the starting locations

Old: New:

Adjusted Turinium Requirements

The Turinium Requirements in Ashes are not only vastly inconsistent, they are also too high. Almost all games will come down to annihilation of the enemy, with Turinium levels being ignored and neglected. Turinium Generators are still actively contested due to the additional resources they provide, but Turinium as a victory condition is not providing any strategic diversity and consideration from players.

I have standardised the Turinium levels on the current and future ranked maps, lowering the Turinium requirements where it is too high and making it more consistent. I used 500/750/1000 as the basis for Tiny/Small/Medium maps, but varied it slightly depending on how difficult Turinium acquisition is on those maps.

New Ranked Map Pool

The following maps are suggested for the next ranked map pool, assuming that these maps are updated with the above adjustments. While this map pool has small and medium maps, it is mainly skewed towards tiny. Some players don’t like the faster pace of tiny maps, preferring the more forgiving pace of medium, but those players are more likely to be playing more casual team games instead of 1v1’s, so it wouldn’t make sense to tailor the map pool around those types of players. If Ashes had a map veto system, that would give more flexibility to add more maps of different types.

You are welcome to comment on these changes. We hope to release v2.1 quite soon.

Galactic Civilizations games have had ship building in them for almost 20 years.  And ever since, people have used it to create all kinds of amazing designs from robots to their favorite Sci-Fi ships.

Ship designer from Galactic Civilizations II

With Galactic Civilizations III, players were able to share their designs with millions of other players via Steam Workshop.  Suddenly, players could download and play with almost any type of ship imaginable.

As much as players loved being able to design and share their ship designs, there was one thing they kept requesting over and over: the ability to assign ship designs to a Civilization and have them use it.  This way, if they wanted to create a race of giant robots, they could.  Or if they wanted to play their favorite sci-fi race (or play against it) they could.

In Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade their wish is fulfilled!

Civilization Builder

First, video. Paul Boyer and I sat down with the Civ Builder the other day. I wanted to show off the laser space sharks and aquatic race we built. Check out this exclusive video to see what we created.

Now, let's walk through the new Civilization Builder, screen by screen. From the main menu there is a new button - Civilization Builder.

The Civ Builder exists outside the game.

Once inside, the player is greeted with a series of screens that lets them configure a completely new civilization.  With the Steam Workshop, you can download new logos, alien portraits, alien backgrounds, alien images, etc. 

Players can put together a completely new alien race using assets shared by other users.

Once you have decided what your alien civilization looks like, you can move on to what their strengths and weaknesses are.

The trait screen lets you assign the civilization various strengths and weaknesses. Many of these abilities give them unique gameplay features.

From there, you can decide what their ships will look like.

Ship Visual Style

There are dozens of different color combos you can play with, along with a host of different textures and materials.  You can give your ship style a gritty, beat up look or a...well, completely outrageous look.

Once you finish deciding what visual style your ships will have, you can move on to assigning ship designs to each class of ship.

Here you can assign a ship design to all of the auto-generated ships which is what the AI will use as well.

Here, you control every default ship in the game.  In the above example, I have assigned my colony ship to be a giant robot fish because...of course!

But let's say you don't like the choices we provide (and yes, we're going to include giant robot fish).  You can click a button and go onto Steam and browse the tens of thousands of ship designs that have been made by players already.

Fans have created virtually every kind of ship you can imagine. 

Picking a cool ship design, it is instantly in the game.  The GalCiv ship designer is essentially a giant set of blocks that you can use to create anything. For the past two years, players have been busy making lots of ships.

Downloaded ship design is mixed with the color and materials chosen earlier.

This is then repeated for each of the ship categories in the game. 

Next up, players will want to give their civilization some personality.

Personality Editor

On the Personality screen, players can decide how the AI will use this player.  They can also set up what the AI will say in various common scenarios.  If that's not enough, the player can directly access that civilization's XML file to go crazy with how they will react in different situations.

Once you are done, you can save your Civilization and even upload it to Steam (if you use other people's designs, we ask that you get their permission).  Once uploaded to Steam, other players can download the entire civilization, ships and all, in a single click and play as that civilization or play against them.

My Fish Civilization in game. They're hungry!

Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade will be released in Spring of 2017 on Steam and GOG.   You can follow it on Steam by going to its Steam page.

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Our story so far...

Stardock loves real-time strategy games.  Our customers love real-time strategy games (Sins of a Solar Empire remains our best selling game of all time).  And we want your opinion on something important to us.

When Stardock sold off its digital distribution business to GameStop in 2011, we took that capital to help found a number of new studios including Soren Johnson's Mohawk Games, Mothership Entertainment, Stardock Towson and Oxide Games.  Our goal was to build new technology and studios that would create innovative new games.

In short, we've been pretty busy.

Ashes of the Singularity: A background

Of these new games, the first to ship was Ashes of the Singularity.  It is the first game to use the new Nitrous engine developed by Oxide Games. 

Nitrous is an amazing engine and all our new games are standardizing on it.  What makes it special is that it is core-neutral. That is, the more CPU cores you have, the more it can do.  It scales almost linearly as you can more CPU cores.  This means we can do interesting things like object space lighting, handle thousands of light sources, do all kinds of interesting things with AI,  simulations, etc.

Since Ashes of the Singularity was the first engine to use it, we were cautious as to how much we would invest into the game itself.  Nitrous is amazing but it was new. And the things we were trying to do had never been done before.  There was no DirectX 12 or Vulkan when we started working on it.  We were building it based on the theory that such a graphics platform would have to be made and got super lucky that they were made before the game shipped. 

On DirectX 11, you need a pretty powerful machine to run Ashes of the Singularity (on DirectX 12 or later Vulkan, you can run it on a potato practically, that's how much better DX12/Vulkan are).

But, like I said, there was no DirectX 12 or Vulkan back then so we designed the game to appeal to as many people as possible while still showing off what the engine could do. If all went well, the game would sell around 50,000 units in its first year.  That would be a very respectable release for a game that could only run on a fraction of the PCs available at the time.

DirectX 12

I can't even begin to tell you how much of a game-changer DirectX 12 was.  Suddenly, this game that was going to require a monster machine to run could run on much more reasonable hardware.  That's because DirectX 12 lets every CPU core talk to the graphics card at the same time.  On DirectX 11, only 1 CPU core can talk to the GPU at once.   As some may recall, people were dubious about the game's benchmark results on DirectX 12.  But as people quickly saw, it was a massive difference.

Who is the target market?

During the early access program, there requests, often strident, for features that we felt would alienate the mainstream gamers.  While we personally liked the features they wanted (upgradeable defenses, strategic zoom, more unit progress, etc.) we felt that this would create a learning curve that would keep us from even getting to the mere 50,000 units we hoped to sell to break even.

Ashes delivered massive-scale warfare across a planet

Release

When the game shipped, it quickly reached a user base of over a hundred thousand players not counting the hundreds of thousands of players who got the game as part of their video card purchase. 

It also became apparent that many of them wanted an RTS a lot more depth where depth meant things like strategic zoom, upgradeable defenses, more resources, lots more unit classes, etc.  But doing so, we felt, would be a bait-and-switch.  I realize that some hard-core RTS fans can't imagine not wanting to have dozens of unit types but as someone who has tried and failed to get their friends to play FAF, learning curve matters.

So we decided to create a new SCU for those players who wanted a "bigger" RTS.  Escalation.

Escalation caters to the more dedicated RTS fan.  Strategic Zoom, Upgradeable defenses,  Specialized units

Divergence

Last fall, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation was released.  It's a stand-alone game with an $20 upgrade price for people who have the base game.  It got universally favorable reviews (lowest review being a 75) in the media and has a 81 Steam score. 

Meanwhile, the base game didn't fare as well . A lot a lot of passionate RTS players who had lobbied for what was in Escalation felt they were being asked to pay again for the game they wanted in the first place. Thus, the base's games Steam score went from "Mostly Positive" to something like "This game will kill  your pets" on Steam even though the game has continued to get frequent updates, new units, etc.

One engine: Two games.  The base game for the mainstream and Escalation for the dedicated RTS fanbase. Which game do people want us to focus our energy on?

Merging

And so here we are with the debate unresolved.  Which kind of RTS do people want us to focus on?  In the long-run, we need to focus on one RTS.

So here is the plan: Let the market decide. 

What we want to do is give everyone who bought the game in early access or earlier a copy of Escalation (provided Steam and GOG are okay with this).   Everyone who bought the upgrade from Ashes to Escalation will get a season pass to the DLC we're adding to Escalation.

Then, with user bases a bit more equal, we can see which game people prefer.  Let the players choose which game they prefer based on what they actually play. 

Feature difference between the two.

The Long-Term plan

The game's hardware requirements today (4 core CPU, 2GB of video memory, 1920x1080 resolution min) ensure that it won't be a mass market game either way for some time.  And we are fine with that.  In the not-so-distant future, these hardware requirements will be mainstream and by that point, both games will have evolved.

The base game will evolve so that it becomes easier to pick up and play. The price will continue to get reduced.  The unit mix will continue to evolve (i.e.  we may replace units with better, more interesting ones but keep the unit count reasonable).  It'll still get new races to play, new campaigns and so on.  But the game play will focus on being intuitive.

Escalation will evolve to have more depth. Naval units, additional resources, lots more units, more tech progression. 

There is a case to be made for both.  It'll be interesting to see which one becomes dominant.

Escalation provides many more types of units and defenses to craft ever more sophisticated strategies

The question for you:

Which game fits you the best? The base game or Escalation? And why?