Thoughts getting into Ashes as a new player

Heyya everyone, like the rest of you, I've been hankering for something post SupCom: FA forever, and I finally took the plunge for this game.

I enjoyed the campaign, but for the life of me, discoverability of how to play this game is just the worst. For a game like Anno 2070 NsN's guides were invaluable. Supcom was fun and enjoyable and pretty easy to grok how units fit together, and the economy was easy enough to get into, especially with mods like 2x resources to make it easy, along with distance and economic ramp due to generators/mass fabricators so you could play in a sandbox.

I completed the Ashes campaign because I always play campaigns, so I thought I'd jump into doing skirmishes and the Turtle Wars/Mountaintop scenario(because what turtling RTS player wouldn't want to play those?)

But this game? Impossible to grok how the factions work. I've read the unit information, I read the weapon descriptions. It's taken me around 3+ hours of searching the forums, finding videos of other players playing and ladder matches to even have a semblance of a clue on unit mix and strengths and weaknesses for Substrate, and now I'll also have to go back and figure out how to more effectively play PHC.

And even at this point, I'm still unclear on why or how effective say, Drone Hives are, or how many Capacitors are useful(and after playing 5+ hours of substrate, I've only now found out Capacitor doesn't recharge shields). Maulers are GOAT and probably should be the backbone of Substrate currently? How would I have found that out?

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Welcome to Ashes!

I'm fairly new as well and agree with you on the lack of detailed info.

There are a couple of user created basic guides I found on the Steam community that are helpful, as well as a mod created by Agent Orange that allows you to play the campaign as substrate that really helps get a basic handle on them.

Overall this is still pretty new, and I haven't found a true detailed guide that explains each unit/building/orbital and the effectiveness/counters for them.

The dev team is very involved and I went we will see them continue to flash out the campaign/tutorial based on player feedback, and as the community grows we will hopefully have a few of the expert/legend players write up a true strategy guide.

For now there are still a lot of balancing changes, new units and orbitals in the works so quite a bit will change so any detailed guide would have to be constantly updated.

All in all, be patient and post your specific concerns just like your OP and you will get good answerS and the devs can use the feedback to improve the new player learning curve.

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the best thing that you can do is play single player games against easy bot and start playing around with units and mixes

this is the best way to learn the game

Ranked game for me are very fast games that you need to rush the other player, but you need to learn the best rush tactics

by that you have have to loose a dew games to how how the enemy plays... ( most of the time get ready to go against air units ) most ranked games do air units first.

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I can't understand why it took 5 hours to work out how a faction works.

You've played rts's before..

In t1 you have small short range fast fire drones, slow firing mid range, shield recharge, aa.

t2 you have an anti building, anti swarm, area control and tank, also big mother of a truck which was recently added, can snipe into radar.

Finding out how useful they are is something that you have to test.

The unit descriptions are pretty easy to work out what they are used for, then mixing an army is literally down to you and how you want to play. It's as effective as it's opponent it. If you have a mass of aircraft, you need to build aa. Mass t1 units you get avengers (anti swarm) mixing in a few drone hives.

To answer, against good players drone hives can be countered quite easily with aa as most aa is flak based so it kills them in blobs. Then it's just a bullet magnet.

Those scenarios are really for experienced players, the mountaintop is easy but turtle wars is not, at all.

Again, how do you not understand the economy? It's basic beyond. Recently you can start to confuse things when you add a refinery as it isn't a flat increase but a 20% on whatever node you have.

But seriously, 2 skirmishes could've given you all the information you need about each faction. Don't get me wrong some of it may not necessarily be all useful and relative. Which is why you want to play multiplayer as it'll show you very quickly what works and what doesn't.

But you'll also find multiplayer (ranked) is filled with tons of noobs until you break past 2/3 rank.

A couple months and I imagine most people will break past the numbered section and get into the elo sets.

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