Stardock is setting up a number of Wiki pages:
In the next DLC (Altarian Prophecy) we're going to be bringing back all the GalCiv II ship parts (and they'll be added to the rise of the Terran Alliance dalso)
Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy game set in the not-so-distant future where a single person can control thousands of constructs (the distant descendants of today’s drones) in order to conquer an entire world.
The world is broken up into regions with each region containing various resources that players capture and can then build up defenses, exploit the resources within and use as a staging area to conquer more of the world.
On the one hand, we want players to get a sense of the epic scale of these maps and see vast armies battling it out without turning them all into icons. On the other hand, we want players to be engaged with the world so we’ve resisted getting too abstract with how we display everything. Every unit in Ashes is unique with a specific role whose differences can be subtle. Hence, if we got too abstract, it becomes impossible to recognize the interplay between different unit mixes. One of the strengths of using Oxide’s Nitrous engine is that we can zoom way way out without hiding or abstracting units. The downside is, of course, you zoom out enough and everything looks like “little tiny ants”
The other big challenge has been hardware requirements: Ashes of the Singularity v1.0 requires a video card with 2GB of video memory and a 4-core CPU with a display of 1920x1080 and 4GB of video memory.
According to the Steam hardware survey these requirements have consequences for us.
It is safe to say that at least 70% of the Steam user base cannot currently run Ashes of the Singularity due to low hardware requirements. Despite that, during the month of July Ashes of the Singularity past the 100,000 units sold mark.
We knew, long ago, that our hardware requirements would ensure that Ashes was a niche title on release. It’s done substantially better than projected (in fact, it has done far better than it has any business doing given the hardware requirements and the genre).
To put it in perspective, Ashes sales are at the top of the RTS charts for new 2016 releases despite not having a well known IP and costing $39.99.
Still, a goal of ours is to reduce the hardware requirements. That’s where version 1.3 comes in.
On August 4 Ashes 1.3 was released and we are on the edge of being able to reduce the hardware requirements to 1GB of memory and a 2-core CPU. We’re not there yet but we’re getting pretty close. The one area we really need to work on is the minimum display resolution which is tricky given how generous we were in our UI design (generous to ourselves that is).
Some highlights of 1.3 include:
It’s a pretty meaty update, particularly under the hood. Someone who bought Ashes of the Singularity in May who hasn’t played it since and downloaded version 1.3 would discover that Ashes is a lot faster, a lot smarter, a lot prettier and has a much better campaign. Too late for reviews but important for rewarding early adopters and fans.
Season 1 is over and the winners are:
The ranked multiplayer in Ashes is similar to that of Hearthstone which probably isn’t surprising since it was designed by Adrian Luff who joined us after having been an architect of Battle.net for twenty years. Of the top 10 players, 6 players were Substrate and 4 were PHC.
You can explore the Metaverse by going here: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/metaverse. This site also includes the DirectX 11/12 hardware performance results.
Despite Ashes having a pretty lively multiplayer community, over 95% of the player base only plays single player. As in, they have never attempted to play multiplayer. This is important for fans to understand because we often see people wanting us to spend more time on multiplayer features (something we tend to want to do because we play multiplayer).
So often we have to make tough decisions on whether to put engineering time into features to help multiplayer or engineering time to support modding (we think a lot of people would love to make their own units or just share scenarios and maps with one another via Steamworks).
For that reason, modding and sharing mods will make up a lot of our upcoming engineering time. We want people to be able to make maps, units, scenarios, UI changes, buildings, terrain, etc. and share it easily withy one another.
The first expansion for Ashes of the Singularity will be coming out this Fall. It will be a stand-alone expansion (i.e. you won’t need to buy the base game). This is the same thing we did with Sins of a Solar Empire and Fallen Enchantress and it worked well. A new player would just buy the expandalone and get the base game and the expansion integrated. DLC from the base game will migrate to the expansion (i.e. players won’t have to buy it again).
We also plan to allow people with the base game and the expansion (despite being different products) to be able to play together in multiplayer. We don’t want to split the community and it gives us an opportunity, over time, to make the base game of Ashes of the Singularity a good introduction.
We’ll be announcing the expansion soon but in the meantime, here are some general details:
There are a ton of other features as well but those features will be added to the base game as well for free.
The base price for the expandalone will be $39.99. For a limited time, the upgrade price for existing players will be $14.99.
More soon!
In no particular order.
See you next month!
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I recently picked up a Roomba and am amazed at how far they have come.
Like many people, I followed the original release of the Roomba robotic vacuum it seemed kind of like a toy at the time. No more. It’s for real.
Right now, my office building spends about $1,600 a month on cleaning. Now, vacuuming isn’t the main thing they do but it is a significant part of what they do. It is tempting to just buy three high end Roombas (one per floor) and let them go and see if we could reduce our cleaning costs.
Roombas, and other devices like it, are the leading edge of the AI-based automation revolution that is starting. If you aren’t scared, you should be. I know I am.
When it comes to DLC, what is popular is not always what one would expect.
To that end, here are the top 3 most popular GalCiv III DLC in terms of units sold per day average.
Not in a million years would I have guessed this. The DLC that delivered the psychopathic squirrels that have been a gag in the GalCiv games for years as a major civilization takes the lead.
This is the one I would have guessed to be #1 and it’s not far off. Precursor worlds adds all kinds of unique worlds that helps make exploring the galaxy very interesting.
The Mega events DLC gives you a bunch of cool, but rare, events that can very much change the course of a game. Such mega events are always a tricky thing because who wants their strategy potentially disrupted by an unplanned invasion from another dimension? The answer, apparently, is many thousands of GalCiv players.
What’s your favorite DLC? Let us know what you’d like to see next! www.galciv3.com
Yesterday, Breitbart editor, Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter. The reason, ostensibly, was that he was targeting Leslie Jones, the actress in the recently released Ghostbusters reboot. It would probably be more accurate to say that it was “the last straw” from Twitter’s point of view given Milo’s engagement with Jones was relatively mild and no reasonable person would argue that Milo is responsible for the abuse his followers do. Twitter’s tolerance tends to be based on the politics of the user in question.
With that out of the way, there is no question whether Twitter, the company, has the right to run its service however it wants. If it wants to become the hub of social justice warriors to tweet 250 character virtue signals, they can do that. But here’s the rub: Twitter has repeatedly claimed it wants to become a universal messaging service – like a utility. You can’t be a universal messaging service if you’re kicking people off for wrong-speech.
I can say whatever I’d like on the Internet without once worrying whether Comcast or Verizon are going to cut off my service. Twitter, by contrast, not only engages in moderation but is frequently transparent in its politically selective enforcement. If they really wanted to solve this problem would be to provide more intelligent preferences to control who and how people can interact with each other (see every messaging service out there for examples).
The only realistic way Twitter becomes a viable business, and make no mistake, it’s not viable, is if it achieves its stated goal: a universal messaging service. It’s no where near that goal.
If Twitter wants to simply be a really piss poor BBS that’s certainly their prerogative. But for those who are smugly trying to chide the “freedom of speech” folks for not making the distinction between the private and the public sector, they might well be reminded that it was Twitter that set the proposition that it was the “free speech” platform that was destined to become a utility.
Inevitably, Twitter will go away. It’s architected (and thus costs to run) to be a universal messaging service but it’s execution is more like a bad subreddit. You can’t rely on a service provider who might capriciously end your service.
In no particular order:
That’s all for this month. 
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Greetings!
Season 2 has been delayed until the end of this month so that we can get in contact with the finalists. That gives us a bit more time to get the observer mode feature in and prep for Season 2 balance changes.
Below, in no particular order, are some of the upcoming balance changes:
General objective:
Units are more specialized than before. A swarm of Maulers or Athenas will fall apart against fixed positions. Similarly, the Nemesis can no longer snipe buildings. The Eradicator is still a monster but less so against buildings as befits the only Tier 2.5 unit in the game so far.
If you have any requests or questions, let them below. 
As anyone playing online must have noticed by now, we’ve basically doubled our user base in June. So that’s good.
Version 1.2 was a pretty big deal for helping make Ashes a more mainstream RTS. I say more but I won’t say mainstream. As a practical matter, 40% of the user base doesn’t have the hardware to play Ashes so we’ll always take a bit of a hit in terms of player base and of course user reviews from people who have older systems that won’t be able to play the game well.
I sympathize with players who have outdated systems. I have my sons set up with 2 gaming boxes and when Ashes shipped, neither could play the game. I was certain they had high end boxes but it’s amazing how fast that 5 year old video card becomes…well…5 years old.
Memory Memory Memory
For Ashes, it’s video memory that’s the key. 2GB of video memory is barely enough. 4GB is much better. 8GB is great. But how many people have that in 2016? Not many.
As a practical matter, most RTS players are better off picking up SupCom:FA for $14.99. The only problem there is that obviously, it’ll never be updated. By contrast, we take every cent we make and put it back into the game. For us, it’s not just about making Ashes a great game today, it’s about where it’s going to be in 2017 and beyond.
What’s happening
There really are so many moving parts. For one thing, while our position on “strategic zoom” hasn’t changed, our view on a global view has. Simply put, you can’t play the game on the upcoming “Huge” maps without being able to zoom out, see the world, and give commands to your forces. It bugs me a bit that this is necessary but I think it will allow the game to better reach its potential.
Ashes, at its core, is the natural progression of Total Annihilation. It hasn’t fulfilled that yet imo. We need more units, more progression. I certainly think Ashes is better than TA 1.0 was but people forget that Core Contingency is the version of TA that made it amazing. That is what we will have to.
There are no game engines, that I’m aware of (and it’s my job to be aware of them) that will be able to remotely touch what Ashes is doing for years to come. It’s not about the art or graphics but rather the scale.
SupCom is still the best 3rd generation RTS out there by far in terms of capability. This has nothing to do with whether someone personally thinks it’s fun. I’m purely talking about potential. Someone could take Unity and with enough money make StarCraft 2 Deluxe. But you can’t take Unity and make SupCom even today no matter how much money you throw at it.
So day by day, we are able to take every sale and pour it back into the game. And thanks to you guys, we’ve made tremendous progress in turning what was already a really good game into a really good game. More to come.