In a setting where the human race advanced to unimaginable heights, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation takes us to a new world of intergalactic strategy. Set in the far future, humans have developed capabilities to control large automatic armies from the comfort of planets light-years away; those that can achieve such feats are known as the Post-Humans. The game takes place upon many planets and moons within our universe, and they are home to the kind of large-scale battles that Supreme Commander first brought to us a decade ago.In the story, you play as a Post-Human general sent to take control of planets that have rebelled against the humans. Upon recapturing them from human splinter cells, you quickly come across vessels of unknown origin: The Substrate, a robotic swarm like race that quickly becomes the major player of the series instalment. Singularity has 4 campaigns to play through, each with their own interesting chapters and twists and scenarios that keeps every mission more interesting and unique than the last.Getting into the battlefield feels like a treat, as the supply line mechanic and the impassable terrain make eventual battles feel satisfying when you implement a good approach.

By IGN on March 31, 2016 77. Once you break free from the tactics-focused mindset of most RTS games, Ashes of the Singularity is a challenging, engrossing, and cerebral exercise in strategy that.

Each map has different zones that need capturing so you can expand the player's resources. The base you spawn with has thin white lines stretching off into the distance - these are the supply routes that traverse resources from one zone to the next, till they eventually reach your base. Therefore, the game enforces a good defensive strategy and response time to ensure you keep the map resources flowing, otherwise your supply lines can be broken which restrict your ability to advance. As for the terrain, some maps have impassable terrain, other than for aircraft and units that can land on top of them, which is important for quick map raids and defensive positions.

With map design and resource connections implemented in this way, every part of the map is important to watch out for and maintain.In multiplayer and Skirmish, Ashes of the Singularity takes us back to a time where King of the Hill and map objectives were key components to winning a game. Even though it’s extremely crucial to hold onto the radiation resources, across the map there are around 3 map objective points, that when held, provide a ticking point scoring into an overall winning progress bar, which increase and decrease as the match rolls on. This mode encourages a long and huge build up and can easily last an hour if it devolves into a back and forth objective hold. However, this is a toggleable game mode and does not need to be played - those that want to quickly jump in and out, the standard total annihilation is available to play.Meanwhile, the combat flattens the map mechanics with their 'rock, paper, scissors' style unit combat, where they serve the specific purpose to do damage to the type of unit they counter. Each unit in the game is separated into distinct unit classes: Frigate, Cruiser, Juggernaut, Light and Heavy Aircraft. Frigates tend to be weak and small units that favour numbers over might, and they can also serve as support vehicles, acting as scouts or providing combat enhancements such as shield and health replenishment units.

The Cruisers are the main bulk of your army, and the most unique: they can be swarming vehicles, artillery, anti-frigate, anti-cruiser, anti-air etc. These units can be expensive to build in the early game, but become more frequent as territory is taken and controlled. Dreadnoughts are the largest regular ships in the game: massive ships that dish out lots of damage and counter other dreadnoughts or lay huge damage out to cruiser and frigates.Juggernauts are the super units of the game: like Dawn of War III's race-specific Titans that can reap so much havoc on the battlefield, these units dish out a lot of damage and have huge defensive stats. These tend to appear late in the game, when a large army is already out - building one of these whilst other unit productions are in queue will seriously punish production across all buildings due to the streamlined economy. Finally, we have the aircraft which are grouped into aerial scouts, light and heavy fighters, and light and heavy bombers. These units are necessary to any army as they provide aerial support - bombers are extremely effective against frigates and for air raiding, whilst the fighters are the best mobile anti-air for both factions.As briefly mentioned, the economy is a streamlined model that encourages active spending, due to the supply limit and the positive/ negative surpluses. When building armies, it is important to constantly expand the game to gather more metals and radiation.

Radiation is the most important economic gain on any map, and will be the focal points of any combat: as the game progresses, the gathering of radiation is what streamlines cruiser, aircraft and juggernaut construction. As these are the most important units in any army, controlling these zones are the biggest priority in any match you play.Ashes also has one of the most interesting takes on Technology in a RTS in recent memory. Unlike other examples, Ashes operates its technology by building a faction-unique resource building.

As you build these you gain bonus yields to technology every time the resource ticks, and they are then spent on population upgrades, flat-out health or damage upgrades, or faction abilities. They can also be spent on other technology buildings, capable of making orbital scans, using super weapons, or deploying turrets, all depending on the constructions you have made on the map.Despite so much choice and thinking, the game is let down by its UI. With the unique way of doing technology comes a significant risk of managing the locations of the handy tools, and the main UI has 3 buttons: production tab, technology tab, and ability tab. In the latter is where you get to issue the special support and offence abilities, and after playing around with different skirmishes for around 10 hours, I'm still not familiar to their way of managing the tabs, which I feel is down to how alien it feels in the genre.Another area of fault for the UI is down to key bindings. The game does not let you know the default key bindings for many of the functions of the game, and pressing the Escape key in a game will show the list of present controls for cycling through items, tabs, and idle workers. Download dynasty warrior 9 pc hienzo. Unlike other RTS, I feel the specifically key-bound unit hotkeys make the game feel much more responsive, rather than tab cycling or clicking individual units.Despite the one issue I have with the game, Stardock has one of the friendliest customer relations games I can think of in a long time. Their DLC pricing is very nice, they come with quite a lot of map choices and a few challenges, and release big units (such as new juggernauts) every few months for free.

This is very important, as the juggernauts completely enhance the combat, which in turn allows us to wage war on an even bigger scale. Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is a huge and intense strategy game with enjoyable maps and unit strategy. With all the different unit types, technologies available and styles of each faction, the player will need some playtime to understand how the game works, which may be overwhelming at first. However, within time the game feels extremely fun strategically, and constant warfare scales as time goes on. The game costs £29.99, but is often on sale for £14.99 for those that want to bargain a huge RTS.

Ashes of the Singularity is Stardock’s latest space-flung sci-fi adventure that’s billed as the “world’s first native 64-bit” real-time strategy game. In short, it’s a resource-hungry affair whose main draw is its ability to support sprawling battles with thousands of individual units scouring its war zones at any given time. “Unprecedented size” is a term that’s been used to this end since the game entered Early Access late last year – a feat that’s made possible courtesy of its purpose-built, native DirectX 12-supporting Nitrous engine that enables your CPU’s cores (the game requires a quad-core processor as a minimum) to send simultaneous instructions to your GPU. With this in mind, your first port of call when firing up Ashes should be its built-in benchmark tool, where you can tinker with your video settings to get the most out of your game. It’s worth noting here that although Ashes’ grandiose scale requires its minimum system specs to be higher than average, the barrier of entry isn’t especially high.

For example, while the game recommends you opt for DirectX 12 (which requires Windows 10) – and also champions itself as one the first to offer full support – I didn’t notice much of a difference, besides a few gained, yet unnoticeable, frames.From my Nvidia GTX970, I was able to run the game at 2560×1440 with the majority of settings on high – anti-aliasing was set to 2x, though – and achieve around 34fps. With these settings I was able to run everything smoothly while marvelling at how positively wonderful it all looked. Running the benchmark for the three minutes it takes to do its thing is a joy to behold too, and acts as the perfect precursor to diving into battle, if for nothing else but to wonder at its sense of scale and truly remarkable audio – the latter of which is capable of sending shivers down your spine. Seriously, I can’t stress that last point enough: ramp your speaker volume up the to max and enjoy the roar of explosive, laser pinging, interstellar warfare. As an aside, for more on Ashes’ multi display adapter, see Phil’s writing on how DirectX 12 lets you mix NVIDIA and AMD cards, and the performance boost it can offer.Onto the game itself. Ashes’ wears its Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation influences on its sleeve – complete with a camera view that can zoom all the way out, to the point where you’re ordering micro machines around a grid; before zipping all way in, so that you’re so close to the action you can almost feel the grinding of a Hades aircraft’s gears. The UI is missing a strategic zoom, but hitting space brings up a strategic map overview which does the same job and doesn’t take too much getting used to.Ashes also operates a familiar streaming economy to Supreme Commander, whereby you build extractors to obtain resources from the land, however strays from SupCom’s escalating tier system, instead at times echoing Company of Heroes in the way it requires you continually hunt down resource points.

Metal and radioactives are the game’s primary resources and regions will typically house one or the other, whereas Turinium and Quanta make up the rest – the former used to boost intelligence and achieve critical mass; the latter needed to boost unit output – thus much of your strategy hinges on your ability to manage all resources simultaneously.Furthermore, resources are consumed as you use them in Ashes, meaning you can queue up as many as you like. Whereas other RTS games – such as, say, StarCraft – only allow you to build things as you have the resources to do so, Ashes lets you queue resources infinitely, and resources are split across all of your projects. This begs you to play Ashes in the same way you might approach a game of Chess – each game operates on a macro level, where you’re rewarded for long-form strategy and thinking a few turns ahead, as opposed to click speed or quick thinking.Ashes’ single-player campaign goes by Ascendancy War. It serves to frame the game’s background lore and at present includes one episode and a last-man-standing-type King of the Hill scenario. Episode one, named ‘Imminent Crisis’, sees you fighting on behalf of the Post Human Coalition as you set off on an 11-mission crusade to make sense of the recent, burgeoning Substrate alien threat.

Like the game’s tutorial, the first few assignments guide you through the basics, drip-feeding you new skills and abilities as you go, while giving your actions a sense of purpose in-line with the game’s story foundations.Mission one, for example, simply sees you manning a scout vessel, performing reconnaissance and learning how enemies out of sight are depicted on the map. Fast-forward a few assignments, and you’re tasked with staging an ambush on a Giant Brain Whale – yes, it is as powerful as it sounds – and its Overmind convoy. Things get messy rather quickly, but this bout rewards you with your first full-on, speaker-bursting engagement that requires you throw everything you’ve got at the enemy force.

Again, the rambunctious shriek of gunfire, laser cannons and explosions is truly remarkable, so much so that I was almost disappointed when the lumbering mechanical cetacea-a-like was eventually defeated.Later levels offer several paths to victory – including the ability to send orbital units behind enemy lines to establish remote bases, which is great fun even in failure – thus opting for the right strategy becomes just as challenging as organising troops, mining resources and fending off the increasingly brutal alien onslaught. Depending on how well you organise all of the above, episode one should take somewhere in the region of eight-to-ten hours to complete, with Stardock planning to release further episodes down the line. Stardock also plan to add Steam Workshop support at a later date to let players create and share their own scenarios, which is certainly something worth watching out for.Although Ashes’ single-player campaign is good fun, Skirmish mode is by far its most fulfilling. Each map – of which there are currently 25 – is split into regions, each with its own power generator and neutral guard units. Ultimately, Skirmish mode is a race for resources whereby you’ll strive to conquer each power station you discover, mine its capital, then move onto the next; all the while ensuring previously occupied regions don’t fall while you’re out exploring. Both the Post Human Coalition and the alien Substrate are playable in Skirmish, the latter of which requires a very different approach to combat as it’s not simply a reskin.Large scale armies of course make for large scale battles, which is where Ashes shines. Air units provide radar and visual coverage, and can bomb targets; whereas ground units are comprised of anything from small frigates around 50m in length, to humongous, kilometer-long Dreadnoughts.

These are your best form of offence, as, besides from their size, they employ a veterancy feature that lets them gain experience with each passing battle. The more experience they accumulate, the more likely they’ll level up, thus acquiring new abilities in turn.When grouped together, ‘meta units’ – bundled units used to form armies – behave as one singular force and can act autonomously under instruction. As you’ll quickly learn, this proves imperative as and when large scale battles relentlessly unfold.

During one Skirmish set piece, one of my units was on the cusp of defeat, and by the time my medical team arrived on the scene we had our backs to the wall. Death looked certain, before a friendly artillery unit appeared on the edge of the war zone and started picking off foes at range. There were too few of us to do any damage, but many of the enemy units turned to face the artillery fighters, thus allowing me adequate time to get patched up and get out of harm’s way.This moment perfectly illustrates just how fluid Ashes’ enemy AI is and how well it translates to battle.

Using multiple CPU cores, the AI constantly evaluates and reevaluates its surroundings which in practice creates an opponent that appears prone to, or at least capable of, error. In the above instance, the enemy would’ve fared better by wiping my medics and I out first, before turning its attention to my artillery units on the flanks. By getting distracted, the reaction felt more realistic and thus my successful escape felt just as satisfying as conquering that region would have done.And this works both ways. There were other occasions where I felt slightly cheated by my enemy’s skills, however decided their success was down to sheer luck and not predetermined dexterity. Granted, much of his is smoke and mirrors, but is also testament to the way in which the game presents it AI.Examples like the above are also part of what makes reviewing a game like this challenging, in that so much of your experience will lie in moments of circumstance. This is a game which looks spectacular, sounds downright amazing, implements engaging systems and ticks all of the What Makes A Good Real-time Strategy Game boxes, however its true beauty comes from the moments I’ve experienced that you never will and vice versa.

With more campaign episodes due further down the line, not to mention modding and Steam Workshop support, it seems Ashes of the Singularity can only get better.Fans of Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation will lap up the similarities, but Ashes of the Singularity is far more than a clone. When you take all of this into consideration and add unsurpassed scale to the mix, you’re definitely onto a winner.