A new patch for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is out today. Included in the update are some added features, improvements, and bug fixes.
A major addition to the game is support for mods. Specifically, you can modify game files or create your own maps and scenarios. If you prefer to play the vanilla version of the game, you can also disable installed mods in game’s settings. You also have three new maps to try for matches—Brighid, Aenghus, and Manannan—which allow eight, 10, and 12 players, respectively. Once you have the foundation for your base, you can optimize production with a new feature that will let you select multiple factories and give identical orders to each structure, or press the Ctrl key to issue individual orders for each selected factory. You can also view replay videos after your matches or go to the leaderboards and watch replay footage of the game’s top players.
There's a long list of balance changes to the game, which the developers said were the main purpose of the update. In addition to the ongoing effort to make gameplay as fair as possible, the changes should allow you to utilize different strategies for combat, weaken tactics that were abused in the past, and allow you to use late-game tech units more often.
Another portion of the update was dedicated to UI improvements in order to make it easier for newer players to understand the many aspects of the game. These changes include the renaming of structure categories so that it’s more familiar to newcomers, for example, and changing the grid layout of some units and buildings to make it easier to discern which functions are easier to learn and use. Surprisingly, the list of bug fixes is small, although this new update might expose some new issues within the game. You can read the lengthy and detailed update notes on the game’s forums.
Because the game was optimized for use with AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs, we decided to use it to test the Ryzen 7 1800X chip. You can check out the full results for yourself, but in short, the charts “showed a solid performance gain” on the DirectX 12 API, but we’ll also test the game running on DirectX 11 sometime in the future.
