Real-Time Controls, Content, and Cohesion in Ashes of the Singularity II

Wishlist Ashes II

In the early era of RTS games, we did not have what later became known as ‘control groups’. Units were selected and ordered individually, or the user could drag-select a box around a group of units and issue (the same) order to all of them at once.

That’s the basic gist, but it’s not the whole story. All the way back to some of the earliest real-time games, we had some unique control schemes.

In one of the earliest real-time games, although it was real-time tactics, The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge had the concept of ordering an a group of units with a single selection and command.

Quick recap: The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge has you controlling up to 12 mechs on a map. The 12 mechs were broken down into 3 groups (lances), each group having 4 mechs.

Your ‘first’ lance allows you to select and order each mech individually. So you have total control over this ‘command’ lance, and your character piloted one of those 4 mechs. Mechs could be ordered to specific tiles and told to stop there.

But the other 8 mechs could only be controlled in groups of 4. There isn’t much of an alternative UI/UX for this; you really just select any of the mechs in lance B or lance C, issue an order, and all 4 of the mechs try to roughly perform that action. You couldn’t position them on specific tiles, just kinda had to hope they’d go roughly there.

The goal is hybrid; give very precise tactical control of one lance, but simplify controls for additional units so the game can scale to bigger battles without slowing down the pacing.

But the results were mixed. The Crescent Hawks Revenge is a single-player, campaign-focused game. It has missions that are very difficult, with attrition that carries over between missions. Trying to ‘guess’ where units 5 through 12 would go, and exactly what they would do, didn’t always mesh well with the very specific need to ‘win the battle while taking as little damage as possible'. The game emphasized tactical execution, and then removed the ability to do that on 2/3 of your units in the later, longer, harder missions.

It’s still a fun game and a great throwback for Battletech fans, but, the content (missions) of the game conflicted a bit with the systems, because the missions were ‘tactically demanding’ but the controls were only ‘somewhat tactically affording’.

But the idea of controlling groups of units, rather than individuals still has a lot of value, as seen in how control groups became the ‘norm’ in RTS games. The feeling of escalating battles, starting with a few units and progressing to a sprawling armies is one of the joys in RTS games, and we needed something (like control groups) to help manage things once you move beyond having just ~7 units.

This is where the Army system, conceptually, was born. Armies are basically control groups with a higher levels of intelligence, and they’re the first thing you start interacting with in the game, rather than the thing you only start using once you have 7+ units running around and need a shortcut to manage them.

Ashes of the Singularity II still allows you to control individual units, if you want to, but it’s not a tactics-focused game. Positioning matters, such as trapping enemies in chokepoints and narrow passes, but the scale of the combat is such that you rarely need to micromanage every single artillery unit to be in an exact specific tile. It’s more important to get that artillery army into position early enough to hammer the opposing column as it moves through a narrow pass than to sweat having each one (of possibly many!) artillery units in exactly the correct spot. So we wind up solving the issue in two ways:

• Content and combat isn’t as micromanagement intensive as strategy games that focus on attrition, constant special ability activation, etc.

• Tactical micromanagement is still possible though, if and when you need to, by ordering specific units rather than the entire army.

Ashes of the Singularity II is what we might call a macro-RTS; we approach combat top-down, rather than bottom-up. We expect from the getgo that you’ll soon be controlling and ordering 50+ units, not just 5, and everything from the content to the systems are built around that. Sure there are certainly times when you’ll be controlling a smaller overall force; the scale of fights is pretty massive, but we know that the average scale of combat is very large, often being 100+ units, and can grow to even larger battles on big maps or in team games. And we hope that everything we’ve built plays well with that expectation, so you feel like a general truly commanding a sprawling army, rather than a commander or squad-leader who’s controlling a small subset of units.

Side Note: Ashes of the Singularity II probably feels more like a Battletech Alpha Strike or Battleforce, rather than classic Battletech or The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. If you’re a fan of those style of macro-strategy games, you should definitely check it out!