Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

The AI in this game is so damn frustrating. Your units will spread out and pull away from anything before attacking and will completely disregard your attack orders at times. I used to enjoy playing this but after coming back after 2 years I can no longer recommend this. Pick up Supreme Commander/ Forged Alliance. Its a decade old game with better AI and game play. If you're after online check out the Forged Alliance Forever community. Its a community driven project keeping SupComs PVP and modding alive and well.

Had pretty high hopes for this game since it's made by the same team that made Sins of a Solar Empire but this is nowhere near as good. I tried both the "classic" game and Escalation but found myself frustrated by both. For some reason I can't get used to the UI and there are a lot of little quirks to it that are just super annoying and ruin the experience. For example, air units are really annoying because they wander too easily and are quickly shredded by defenses so if you try to park them near the enemy for a minute while you get your ground units in place, they'll probably wander into the AA range and get wiped out before you get to start the attack. And I've had that happen even when I left them a good distance away. This wandering also makes them hard to select more often than not so if you don't bind them to a number key then trying to quickly grab them for air support somewhere is a nightmare. Some of the air units are pretty powerful so it's nice to have them available but they're such a pain to manage that I often avoided it. Ground units were easier to select since they move slower but they also can wander off a little sometimes and get sucked into combat accidentally. Being able to build units and have them automatically get added to a team is convenient but it's kind of dumb that you can only do this when you have certain units in the team. Speaking of the units, there are quite a few options which is pretty overwhelming at first. Learning how to balance 8+ unit types in a team depending on what the enemy has creates a steep learning curve and with how quickly these units die, it gets very hard to keep up. I always hated Starcraft for how quickly the units die, forcing you to focus on build queues instead of the actual combat and this game has that same element to it. If you like managing income streams and constant flows of units then you might enjoy this but I don't really find that enjoyable so it sucked all the joy out of this game for me. My style is more of a "turtle" I guess. I like to get my base fortified first and then make a massive army to go on offense and focus on the combat while the base more or less defends itself with turrets. This style is largely possible in the C&C games and you can do it effectively in SoSE. In this game you have to build a million of everything and constantly replace stuff because the AI seems to always be capable of tearing through whatever you have with relative ease. If you can keep a steady stream of units going then you can fight them back but learning to do that effectively will probably take many many hours because there are so many units/capabilities/upgrades to memorize. As a casual gamer that doesn't have a tremendous amount of time to play anymore, I don't have the time or interest in studying the intricacies of a game like that. In my opinion, if it takes more than a few hours to come up with a somewhat effective strategy then the game is probably overly complex. After 7-8 hours of Escalation, I finally decided to throw in the towel and uninstall it. This game just felt like too much of a chore and I wasn't enjoying it. It looks nice and things do function so I'm hesitant to say it's a bad game but it's absolutely not one that fits my play style so I'll be sticking with SoSE, C&C, Rome: Total War, and waiting for SoSE2 to satisfy my RTS craving. I suggest you skip this one if your play style is like mine: casual gamer, turtle, dislikes constantly micro-managing unit build queues.