G'day.



It's been a very busy past couple of weeks for us, between the launch of the new Juggernauts in 2.5 and the Steam Publisher sale we had last weekend. On a personal note, the Agamemnon and Eye of Darkness were the first two units I designed, so it was a great experience starting them from scratch and seeing them develop into the final end result!

##Friendly Community##



The other day I came across this Steam user review:







It's wonderful to see people appreciate the friendly community that has grown around the game. I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who participates in discussions, events and offers help to players on any platform. I think we have a great community and it's a pleasure to work and game with you. The Ashes discord has been rapidly growing recently and has featured a number of improvements lately. If you haven't done so already, you can join it here.



##Air Transports##



They're coming! The designs for them have been completed and the concept art is being worked on. Implementing Air Transports will be a big engineering undertaking, especially due to the level of automation we want to give them, so it will take some time before they are ready. There will be two air transports for each faction, a light and a heavy transport, they will load and unload units via short range teleportation.



Here's a sneak peak of the concept art for the light and heavy PHC Transports:













##2.6##



We've recently begun working on our next major update, 2.6. Aside from the new tutorials, the current plans for this update is general gameplay and quality of life improvements, before we get too bogged down with big flashy new features such as Transports, Naval etc. This won't be the most exciting update, but it will feature some changes that should make the game feel and play better.



##New Tutorials##



We're about to finally retire our dated tutorial and replace it with two new ones, the Basic Tutorial and Advanced Tutorial. These pack in more important information to new players, in a much faster and more interesting manner. The tutorials will be most players first impression, so we wanted to improve the new user experience and make sure they aren't confused by mechanics that weren't explained to them.



##Design Tweaks##



2.6 will include some small reworks to improve parts of the game. Here's a couple of ideas I've been playing around with lately.



Healing/Repair Rework:

Engineers & Constructors not being effective at repairing structures is unintuitive and unfair to Substrate who lack Medics.

Medics can no longer heal buildings

Engineers/Constructors can no longer repair units

Engineer & Constructor repair amount increased from 15 to 100

Substrate Air Production Rework:

Substrate can get control of the skies far too easily, being able to swap all land based production into producing air units. It is impossible to scout a Substrate heavy air transition due to the lack of dedicated air production structure.

Light air units moved from Assembly to Aviary

Aviary cost greatly lowered.

Rampager and Harbinger locked behind tech buildings or some kind of upgrade

Punisher reworked to distinguish and have a unique role compared to the Rampager



What do you think of these ideas? What other changes to the factions would you like to see?



Cheers,

Callum.