Ashes: JULY 2016 Dev Update

Greetings!



Happy 4th of July!



Stardock is closed this week for its Summer vacation but I wanted to give you guys a general status report.



## SEASON 1 ##



With the Steam sale and the holiday, we have extended Season 1 to the end of July. We are in the process of contacting the top ranked players to set up a tournament for later this month which we plan to stream as many of the games as we can.



## NEXT UPDATE ##



We plan to release version 1.24 of Ashes on July 14th. That version will mostly be bug fixes and and balance updates along with Observer mode in multiplayer.



## STABILITY ##



We are seeing problems with certain video driver features that seem to cause some instability in the game. If you are running an app that is designed to "optimize" Ashes, we recommend you turn it off as odds are its optimization focuses mostly on the benchmark.



The dead give away is if you're running DirectX 12 and there seems to be lag when moving around the map. That indicates something has injected itself. The best way around it in my experience is to go to your system tray and unload and so-called experience/optimization apps.



## GENERAL PERFORMANCE ##



Version 1.24 will probably include some new performance improving code. That said, I strongly recommend people not bother with anti-aliasing. If it makes a visual difference for you that you can actually tell then by all means, use it but in my experience, it's not worth the extra video memory it consumes (and at above 1920x1080 it's ludicrious imo).



## PLAYER REVIEWS ##



As predicted the Steam sale knocked our player review scores down. This almost always happens when a game is on sale since you have players who are not always the right fit for the game.



If you are an experience Ashes player, we ask that you take the time to review the game (pro or con).



## THE FIRST EXPANSION ##



Most of the team is working on the first expansion pack. This will be somewhat akin to what Forged Alliance was for SupCom back in the day. More units, more players, bigger maps, more map types, better handling of armies, a Global view zoom out map and much more.



We plan to have this expansion priced at near DLC levels initially to reward those who were early adopters before changing the price to its final price.



We also expect that some of the features of the expansion will make it into Ashes 1.5 which will be a free update for existing players (for example, anything we do to improve AI, modding, unit behavior, responsiveness, etc. would get put into 1.5).



So that's all for now. Let me know if you have any questions.



Cheers!



-brad



