Ice Maps, Orbitals, and more Make their Debut in Ashes v.70!

Published on Thursday, December 10, 2015 By Island Dog In Ashes of the Singularity News

 v.70 adds Ice Maps, Orbitals, New "Cruiser Factory" building, and more!  
 
 
Progress for Ashes of the Singularity is moving along nicely and the Dev Team is pleased to present you with their latest update, v.70! This update includes a lot of exciting new features and bug fixes. For a full and detailed change log, check the bottom of the post.
 
Orbitals
The new Orbital Command and the Orbital Fabricator buildings now offer you new ways to wage war with your enemies by ordering various types of assaults or assistance from above. The following orbitals are being added with this update:
  • Incursion: Take your enemy by surprise and drop a small raiding force behind their lines for an attack they won't see until it's shooting them right in the face.
  • Plasma Storm: Your enemy will get a real "charge" out of this one! This orbital strike affects an area of your choice and damages all enemy units and buildings over time within that area.
  • Intensive Care: Is there a doctor in the house? Well, there is now! Heal friendly units and buildings within an affected area with this orbital.
  • Call Engineer: Engineers too slow and never around when you REALLY need them? Now you can deliver an engineer to a selected spot on the map and have them begin work immediately, without all of that pesky down time.

Ice Maps
Winter is coming...and so are the Ice Maps! The team has added four new maps to the game: Shredded, Crater, Triad, and Frosthaven. As a bonus, Scorpio, Cerius, Aven and Frosthaven maps now also have night environments! Check out these screen shots - we think they're pretty...cool.
 
ashes-dec15-b Ashes-dec15-k Ashes-dec15-l
ashes-dec15-z ashes-dec15-w


Cruiser Factory
Is your early game stuck on "cruise" control? Not anymore! Cruiser units now have their own dedicated factory required for construction. This allows for more variety and interest in early-game decisions as you start to construct your base and raise your army. 
 
There are some more changes, additions, and bug fixes in v.70 which you can read about in detail below. We hope you enjoy the new features!
 
 
 
Full Change Log:

  • Gameplay

    • New Orbitals Abilities - Orbital Command & Orbital Fabricator buildings unlock the following abilities

      • Incursion - delivers a small raiding force behind enemy lines

      • Call Engineer - delivers an engineer to where it’s needed most

      • Intensive Care - heals friendly units and buildings in the affected area

      • Plasma Storm - damages enemy units and buildings over time in the affected area

    • Ice World Maps

      • Shredded - large

      • Crater - medium

      • Triad - small

      • Frosthaven - small

    • Night Environment added to Scorpio, Cerius, Aven, and Frosthaven Maps

    • New Building: Cruiser Factory - Cruiser units now require a unique factory to construct, making for some more interesting early-game decisions

    • New Map: Lair of the Turtle

    • New Map: Polis

    • Keep Playing option after match victory (in case you want the glory of crushing every last one of your enemy’s units)

    • Multiplayer Handicaps

    • Team Chat: Tab now switches between All Chat and Team Chat in MP games

    • Improved overall scoring method in Metaverse

    • Map Balance:

      • Knife Fight - region connections more balanced for each player

    • Balance

      • Orbital abilities now increase in cost the more you use them

      • 100 Quanta available at the start of the match

      • balance a little between apollo and drone bay

      • Scouts ignore combat slow down

      • Changed cost of Quantum Relay from 270/360 to 360/270

      • Increased cost of repair by and drone bay

      • Reduced accuracy of most weapons

      • Made the Engineer more expensive

      • Reduced cost of T3s slightly

  • Art & Graphics

    • Terrain texture quality significantly improved

    • Terrain object quality settings - trees can now be turned off to improve performance, or turned up for more dense/common forests

    • Environment lighting improved

    • Radar signatures brighter

    • New Lightning Effect for Zeus Thunderbolt and Seed Attack

    • Building explosion VFX polish (and performance improvement)

    • Increased missed shot distance for relevant weapons

    • Unit polish

      • Engineer

      • Fury

      • Pan

  • UI

    • New Friend invite UI that works in DX12

    • UI art style updates

    • MP lobby & SP setup screen layouts updated

    • Player Profile/Metaverse stat displays updated

    • Adding player color and team indicators to player list in in-game UI

    • Added tooltips for all game options (where explanation was needed)

    • Widening energy bars in unit flags

  • Sound

    • Win/Loss music added on game end

    • lowered volume of VO Notifications

  • Misc

    • Significant performance improvements (especially in DX12)

      • Don't draw shadows for MB frames, Re-use Initial frame data for MB frames for detail objects.

      • Better local sorting of mesh's within an object

      • Slightly better sort logic for draw_elements

      • txaa frames using same batch set with different dynamics

      • Improved performance for plasma whip projectile

      • RegionRenderer. Now takes color directly in 32bit format. Way less temporary memory, and memory movement.

    • Netcode improvements (less lag in MP)

  • Stability

    • Fix for hang when changing between states in UnitPanel

    • Fixed crash in main menu while UI is loading

    • Fix for multiple memory leaks

    • Fixed some controls that were too big

  • Bug fixes

    • Fix to prevent Quanta from going negative

    • Fixed background movie not playing after returning to lobby

    • Fixed missing icons on unit panel

    • More comprehensive fix for bad releases of cached ResourceSets

    • Missing image fix

    • Autosave files not created on machines with foreign char usernames

    • have all buff icons appear (only first five of the ten types were appearing)

    • Fixed bug where you could have an AI setting from a slot stick around to a later MP game and cause a peer's player to be controlled by the AI

    • Fixed messy popup reuse in main menu

    • Fixed no VPs option not handled correctly by pulldowns in game setup screens

    • Changing glare size to be resolution independent

    • FoW hides detail objects (trees)

    • Setting up PHC units to not show destruction mesh at the same time as the constructed mesh

    • Fixed discontinuous Drone LODs

    • Power Amplifier now has a building flag & correct textures

    • Disabling benchmark from the main menu when in the matchmaking queue, adding tooltip to disabled benchmark and multiplayer buttons explaining this

    • Deleting some unused unit maps

    • Fix for hang on shutdown

    • Mouse interaction and tooltips were not checking the clipping area of controls

    • MP match countdown cancels if the player slots change, so you don't change them into an invalid state (like no enemies)

    • Changing hitbox of player profile button in upper-right corner of main menu screen

    • Fixing dbl-click joining the wrong lobby

    • Don't notify that there is an enemy T3 spotted when you spot a team mate's T3

    • Restricting UI scale by resolution to make sure a minimum UI area is visible in the current resolution.

    • Made it so that brand new games with no existing settings default to a resolution that matches the desktop, and fixed the options screen not reflecting that.

    • Re-adding Kick Player button

    • Fixed bug where sometimes units were slowing down when not actually in combat

    • Stuck unit fix

    • Bug fix with metaunit movment

    • Heal ray tweak to cut processing some

    • Client no longer auto-hosts lobby accidentally

    • Fix for host migration issues

    • Disabled auto-saving while the game is paused