As a stand-alone expansion, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity , which is a pretty good, high-level real-time strategy game in the vein of Supreme Commander that never quite clicked and turns it into something great. Additions to the campaign, unit roster, and environmental detail prove an undeniable improvement over the original Ashes, even if some minor issues still remain.Unit variety in Ashes’ huge armies has increased a fair bit, with notably welcome additions in the realm of heavy aircraft (basically flying equivalents of the middleweight cruiser-class ground units) and upgradeable defensive structures. Having a bit more punch behind static emplacements makes turtling against frigate or bomber spam a more viable strategy. Pre-Escalation, the only reliable ways to counter this kind of harassment were blanketing the map in radar stations to create an early warning system, leaving area control units at every vulnerable point, and/or frantically deploying your own aircraft wings to whack-a-mole the enemy’s swift-strike forces.

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“ My favorite new feature is the Supreme Commander-style strategic zoom.

Ashes of the Singularity Escalation Screens 6 IMAGES

Some other new units include the Masochist, which increases its firepower as its health bar drops, and the Harvester, which can camp out on a resource node to increase its output. The latter sort of units provide a strategic economic value, which makes them the most interesting and match-altering additions. I sometimes found myself questioning whether adding so many new specialized ground craft was really worthwhile in a game about colossal engagements where anything smaller than a Dreadnought can tend to get lost in larger army compositions. (Dreadnaughts, somewhat disappointingly, are the one class of ground vessel that didn’t see a roster expansion.) They simply didn’t feel like as impactful an addition (at least at my level of play) as the heavy fliers, economy boosters, or defensive upgrades.The campaign was definitely the weakest portion of the original Ashes, and that remains true with Escalation. However, it’s clear that a lot more effort has been put into the design and presentation. The voice cast has been greatly expanded, and the simple addition of character portraits lent a lot to my sense of who these cybernetic warriors actually are. All of the missions and cutscenes are fully voiced, and while the dialogue writing is borderline cringe-worthy in a couple cases, the story remains interesting, complex, and intelligently crafted. I also appreciated that almost none of the 14 new campaign missions were of the plain old “just win this multiplayer map against the AI” sort. Almost every one of them has some kind of twist or unorthodox objective, like having to raid enemy bases for resource caches on a map with no traditional gathering nodes, and the later ones hint at promising story developments that could expand the universe and the faction roster of Ashes in the future.Frustratingly, there is still some weirdness lingering in the pathfinding AI and the combining of large groups of units into formation-bound armies. Like in the base game, the Form Army button refuses to function reliably past a certain number of units selected. If there’s an upper limit the engine can handle, I’d prefer the interface to just make me aware of it and grey out the button when I’ve selected too many. Having a maximum size for armies would also force some interesting strategic choices in terms of how I divide my forces, which I feel would outweigh any sense that it restricts my gameplay.