Editor's Note: The Escapist is working with Stardock to bring fans this walkthrough and developer diaries for Ashes of the Singularity, its upcoming strategy title that is currently in Early Access on Steam.

Introduction

Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy game that pits humanity in the 22nd century against a seemingly all-powerful race of machine AI across many different worlds.

Players find themselves on a particular world with a home base, called a Nexus, and a single Engineer and must acquire the necessary resources to annihilate all enemy presence from that world.

The game is won either when a player eradicated the enemy's Nexus or if they control special victory points called Turnium Generators long enough to put the planet into a chain reaction that gives you full control of it.

Hardware Requirements

Because the game simulates a war across an entire planet involving potentially tens of thousands of individual units the hardware requirements for this game are important:

64-bit Windows 7, 8.x or 10

At least 6 GB of total system memory

A dedicated graphics adapter with at least 2GB if GDDR 5 memory

At least 4 CPU cores

Minimum screen resolution of 1680x1050

Make sure your video drivers are November 2015 or later. Otherwise you will run into problems. This game makes full use of your hardware.

DirectX 12 vs. DirectX 11

If you have Windows 10, we recommend you use DirectX 12 if you can. DirectX 12 allows all of your CPU cores to connect to your GPU simultaneously. In DirectX 11, only 1 CPU core at a time could do this. This allows, generally, for significantly better performance depending on the quality of the video driver.

First thing to do: Run the benchmark

When you first run the game, please make sure you run the benchmark to ensure you are satisfied with the performance. Your average framerate should be over 30fps at the end of the benchmark. If not, please go to the options and decrease the video card settings. Because Ashes is being designed for both today's and tomorrow's video cards, don't worry if your video card doesn't perform well on the highest settings. Our medium settings are roughly equivalent to a normal game's highest settings.

Learning the Game

We recommend you start with a single-player game. The Tutorial is not yet available in the Beta (sorry!).

We also recommend playing a beginner AI for your first game until you are more experience.

Your First Moves

When you begin the game, you have only your Nexus and your engineer. This guide will give you suggestions on what to do next.

For your first move, we recommend building a factory:

Once the factory is built, build a few scouts.

Left-drag select your scouts:

Instruct your scouts to go capture a power generator. Over time, power generators attract "Splinters", neutral mindless constructs that live mindlessly off the power generators.

Once the enemy units are destroyed you can being capturing the generator.

Building Armies

In Ashes of the Singularity, you are fighting a war, not a battle. This means that you shouldn't think too much about individual "units". Instead, think of each unit as part of a larger machine. Each unit, therefore, is really just a particular type of a gun or a special ability you need. These "units" are merely pieces of a bigger unit which we call an Army (actually we think of it as a Meta unit but marketing didn't like that term..).

Once you have built a mix of units you like, form it into an army and it'll act as a single bigger unit. Then send them off to capture more regions.

While your army is engaged in battle consider building a Quantum Relay:

Capturing Turinium Generators

One of the ways to win the game is to generate a critical mass of Turinium which allows you to instantly take over the world.