FREE DEMO Now Available for Ashes of the Singularity II

I am not sure if this is where you want the feedback at or somewhere else, so I apologize if this is the wrong spot.

At any rate, I have only played a couple skirmish games so far as Earth Forces and I like the aesthetics, but they feel incredibly slow.

I understand this is an early beta and things will improve, but I will say the interface is very clunky for everything. I know you are going a different route from Ashes one, but it really feels like we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this as it looks and feels way too different.

Most of my issues so far I am sure will be adjusted or I could get used to with time, but there is one feature that is a hard no for me and that is the building slots. I'm sure there will be people that like it so maybe a toggle to turn it off, but for me it is really close to being a deal breaker. It is too restrictive and causes too much frustration for me. Slows things down and doesn't allow for turtling if that is something you like to do. It also spreads out your manufacturing too much which can make it more frustrating to find what you are looking for when there is a lot of other things going on.

I have more play testing to do, but I am still optimistic for the game even with the current rough state of thing.

Hello! I appreciate you taking the time to write this out and share your feedback. We are internally testing options and variations for the building slots as originally we wanted it to be more impactful than what it became, even with the defensive structures not counting towards slot we understand the want people have for base building and are listening closely to feedback from the demo on how to best build and improve the game. I appreciate your optimism, and if youd like to help support the game, consider leaving a review. 

I think all people really wanted was a fleshed out campaign , different unit types and better/higher graphics settings. I would experiment new features in dlc's and gather feedback like that instead of risking the entire product. bring back construction bots and base building like the first game and just expand what you can do in each zone maybe even have walls and siege units.

There are two complaints in this thread and they are being treated as one.

Disliking the slot restriction is fair. Being told where things can go, and having your production spread out as a result, is a real thing to object to and it has nothing to do with nostalgia.

Bringing back base building is a different ask, and that one I would push back on. I put a great many hours into the first game and the base was never the interesting part of it. It was somewhere you left. What the game was actually about was how much army you had, where it was, and whether you could hold two fronts at once. Walls and siege units belong to a game where the map is a set of positions to crack. Ashes was a map where the position moved because the armies did.

What I want carried over is the thing that always broke first for me, which is the late game with everything on the field at once and the map fully contested. If that holds up, the slot rules are something I can live with.

Arrow is right that there are two complaints here, but I would put them back together, just not the way Equinox does.

Base building in this genre has rarely been about the base itself being interesting. It is a place to put your attention during the stretch where the army is walking. Take it out and that stretch does not get better on its own, it gets empty, and the design has to find something else for you to do with those minutes. A slot system is one answer to that. It is a stricter answer than most, but it is answering the same question base building was answering, which is probably why the people who miss one are the same people annoyed by the other.

Where I am with Arrow is on walls and siege units. That is a request for a different game, and it is not the game Escalation was. Escalation ran on armies being somewhere and on you not being certain where the other side's was. Positions you crack one at a time are a perfectly good design, they just slow the map down, and that map cannot afford to be slowed down much.

The bit I would actually want nailed down is the thing Ramma mentioned, that defensive structures do not count against slots. If that holds, the turtling objection is narrower than it reads, because what HippyBait described is production getting scattered rather than defence being impossible. Scattered production is an interface problem first. I have not played the new one, so this is me reasoning from the genre rather than from the build.