Engineers are terrible at marketing. We really are. If you’re playing Ashes of the Singularity, you may have noticed we updated the game last week. A minor update with some major changes. Under the covers, Nitrous got a pretty big boost. But because it doesn’t add features, it didn’t get a lot of attention. But performance wise, it was the result of months of optimization. Making the largest scale RTS of all time is a big challenge in 2016. ...
ESCALATE ON NOVEMBER 3 On November 3, Ashes of the Singularity gets its first expansion pack: Escalation. It’s a stand-alone expansion which means that if you don’t already have Ashes of the Singularity, you can just buy Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and get everything that’s in the base game too. TOTAL ANNIHILATION vs. SUPREME COMMANDER There are a lot of reasons we decided to separate the base game from Escalation. Much of this...
For this journal, I’m going to, in story form, give you a guided tour of Escalation. Background.. Escalation is the first expansion pack to Stardock’s massive-scale RTS, Ashes of the Singularity. It is sold as a stand-alone expansion with its pricing determined based on whether you already have Ashes of the Singularity or not. To learn more, visit www.ashesofthesingularity.com . The year is 2180… The human race is at an inflecti...
This is going to be long and go into both Escalation, the development of Ashes of the Singularity and discuss the technological singularity. Our story so far… This past Spring Stardock released the real-time strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity. It’s a game set in the post-technological singularity future in which humans have begun to expand to other planets. In this future, a single individual is so powerful that they can manage entire armies of...
Greetings! Sorry I haven't been as active lately. It's been Ashes of the Singularity 24/7 here at Stardock. So let's do this: ## Escalation ## We had to push the release date of Escalation from November 3 to November 10. This is my fault as I just wasn't comfortable with the balance in the campaign. It was a bit too hard on the default setting and we needed to adjust it. Obviously, you can change the difficulty level (side note: In hin...
A very long time ago, like, a million years ago, Stardock made a game called The Corporate Machine. Like all of Stardock’s games, it was played almost exclusively single player. But unlike our other games, it was surprisingly popular in multiplayer. How come? For The Corporate Machine we did the following: Start-Up Watcher: A little system tray app that monitored for available games and let people launch it. 7 multiplayer only keys that people who owned t...
The Basics Massive-scale real-time PC strategy game Requires Windows 7, 8, 10 with 2GB video memory, DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, 4 CPU cores. Stand-alone expansion to Ashes of the Singularity. Includes everything from the base game plus Escalation. The Specs The Screenshots The Details 12 new missions further chronicle the story of Ashes of the Singularity: Campaign 1: Memories- See the events of Imminent Crisis fro...
So I did a lot of changes on Ashes balance over the holiday and the team was asking for those changes to be checked in. I said, "Sorry! I forgot to check them in, they're at home..." Then suddenly, I realized, I had taken my work machine home to do those changes and brought my work machine back to the office after break. So I do have them here which means my balance and AI tweaks can go in the upcoming update after all!
Greetings! February is here and there is a ton of stuff to talk about. [..] ## VULKAN ## We have been working diligently on Vulkan support and I am pleased to tell you that we have it...mostly working. We are tentatively scheduled to release Escalation v2.1 (Ashes 1.51) on February 16. Unfortunately, Vulkan won't make it in there as it needs a little more time to bake. ## REPLAYS ## We have this. It's not super stable though so we're still ...
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 ...
By definition, there can only be one singularity. Ashes of the Singularity and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation are being merged. There will be only one game: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Everyone who already has Ashes of the Singularity will also have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. To understand why we have decided to do this a little background on the development of Ashes of the Singularity is needed... Once upon a time... Ashes of...
## ASHES OF THE SINGULARITY IS EVERYWHERE ## We just came back from the Game Developer's Conference. It was a great week for the Nitrous engine (the underlying engine used in Ashes of the Singularity). Big News: AMD is bundling Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with more and more CPUs The hardware bundling keeps a steady stream of new players coming into our community. Moreover, the AMD Ryzen chips, which are 8-cores, really show off the power of th...
We are currently working on additional units for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. The T4s and more T3s are not units you will run into in the competitive multiplayer games but on the bigger maps, late game, we run into a lot of cases where the existing units just aren't powerful enough to distinguish between one civilization and another. Below is a list of some of the units we are considering. Feel free to suggest your names: Name Level ...
It’s amazing how much Ashes of the Singularity has changed in just a few months. It was only released back in May and here we are in December as I write this and it’s undergone a lot of changes. Below I want to outline some of things we have on our plate for 2017: T4s Next year we’re going to introduce Juggernauts. These are T4s The T4s will be to the T3s what the T3s are the the T2s. They will be substantially bigger...
Engineers are terrible at marketing. We really are. If you’re playing Ashes of the Singularity, you may have noticed we updated the game last week. A minor update with some major changes. Under the covers, Nitrous got a pretty big boost. But because it doesn’t add features, it didn’t get a lot of attention. But performance wise, it was the result of months of optimization. Making the largest scale RTS of all time is a big challenge in 2016. ...