Steam Next Fest is upon us, and with it, a playable demo of Ashes of the Singularity II! We’ve been hard at work getting an early version of the game ready for public play.
In this demo, we’re exposing both Singleplayer Skirmish matches, as well as Multiplayer matches. We currently support up to 8 players in either singleplayer or multiplayer, and you can use AI players in both cases with customizable difficulties. We’ve included 7 different difficulties in the demo, ranging from ‘Trainee’, which lets you learn the basics against a fairly passive AI, all the way up to ‘General’, which pressures even our best internal players.
The AI works in both singleplayer and multiplayer, so feel free to team up with your friends in an online co-op comp-stomp as you learn the ropes. There are both Public and Private lobbies in multiplayer for custom games, so bring in friends or make new ones as you learn to play! There is no ranked play (or ‘quickmatch’) in the demo, but those features will be in the full game.
The demo has a selection of three great prebuilt maps, one Small, Medium, and Large map. The small map, Twin Lakes, is an arctic Siberia theme, and is a great place for 1v1 or 2v2 games that are more fast-paced and intense.
Crossroads (Night), our ‘medium’ map, is a 2v2 or 3v3 style map, and showcases our desert environment with a unique nighttime aesthetic.
The big map, Scorched Divide, is a daytime desert map that features a lot of jagged canyons and narrow paths. Positioning and pathing really matter, as there are a lot of cliffs that can really disrupt your ability to quickly reposition to nearby regions.
This is a really large map, targeted at 6+ players, and the ideal place for a 4v4 match. You can also run an 8-player free-for-all here, but realize that this will be a brutal slugfest and we’ve seen games like this run for well over an hour, or in some cases, multiple hours. Good news is that Save / Load is functional (in singleplayer) including autosaves, so you can breakup these marathon games into multiple sessions.
Procedural maps are reserved for the full version of the game, so if you like what you see, please remember to wishlist Ashes of the Singularity II on Steam!
We hope to see you in-game during Steam Next Fest, and enjoy playing the game as much as we’ve enjoyed making it so far.
Check out this quick getting started vid if you want to speed-run through how to construct buildings and recruit new armies.