Ashes April 2019 update

## Orbital / Gameplay Changes in the works ##Our QA team is currently testing out the proposed v3.0 beta branch we've been putting together. There are a number of minor gameplay changes as well as some significant balance changes that will no doubt create some discussion.Here is the general direction we have in mind:1. Orbital abilities that cause AOE damage are going to become significantly more expensive. They'll be just as powerful but we find that having instant death from above too common in the current play style.2. The Mobile Nullifer will get bigger range but it will become much, much more expensive so that it's only a "rich man's' option.3. We have fixed some of the targeting on aircraft that people have asked for. We'll be talking about this more as the fix was both simple and obvious (on the one hand) but the cause was not obvious until...well, until it was.## Multiplayer ##One of the challenges we've run into is that there are certain elements of the game that are non-deterministic which is what cause multiplayer to be an issue when you have people with very divergent hardware specs playing. This isn't really much of an issue in 1 on 1 but when you get 8 v 8 it becomes an issue. This is something we're trying to invest time into now.## Siege of Centauri ##You may have seen the Ashes spin-off game, Siege of Centauri announced. https://www.stardock.com/games/siegeofcentauri/ This is a tower defense game that started out as an Ashes DLC. It's still priced like a DLC and goes into early access later this month. A lot of the tech we've worked on for that as well as weapons and units will be coming back to Ashes when we have a moment.## Linux ##So now that GDC is over, I can't really go into much detail but it should be more obvious now why we've been taking Linux support more seriously in all our games. The continued issue is just working with the driver makers to make sure their Vulkan drivers are able to handle what we need them to do. I don't have an ETA on this but we will likely bite the bullet and put out a Linux beta even with the performance challenges (those with high end systems may not have an issue).## Next DLC ##So the next DLC, not surprisingly, will involve more base building and include new orbital abilities for placing down defenses on the fly. No ETA yet, depends on how hiring goes (we're hiring at Stardock!).Sorry we weren't able to get the v3.0 beta out last month. It's in QA hell right now, partially because we changed the actual unit sizes somewhat (to make them a bit bigger) which is causing its own issues.