So is this going to be akin Act of Aggression, which nowadays is playable in 2 versions - original and reboot? If yes, are u sure this is a good idea? What if i am hypothetically in the TA camp, so not so high on strategic zoom and more complex economy, but i would looove those additional units, which come with Escalation, to have in my base game?

BTW, to me Ashes does not feel like having more content on release than Sins had in 2008. Sins felt far more nuanced from the beginning.

Ashes isn't mod friendly, has an over-simplified research system, doesn't have any depth to unit balance, has no sea units, no transport units, no non-hover land units, no manual ability control.

TA was an immensely deeper game, with naval, transport units, actual use for low tier units beyond consuming extra metal.  There is zero comparison between Sins and Ashes, Sins actually has research trees, varied weapon and armor types, mitigating shields, an ability system so complex you can make 300 file long random event chains.  Even Sins 1.0 was far superior to Ashes.

I'm sorry, but Ashes is an amazing engine and a mediocre game, it's by far the worst RTS I own when it comes to the usefulness of low tier units, they'd disappear if you added a resource exchange method.

I played Sins for hundreds of hours, I modded Sins for thousands of hours.  If Ashes doesn't improve massively, I'll never reach triple digits on play time.

Commanders did have manual control abilities in the original TA(D-Gun and cloaking?), and the locomotion of a unit is not a cosmetic thing when it creates the dynamic balance between weak, but fast units, and powerful, but slow moving weapons fire.  It was also released in the 90's for computers with a tiny fraction of our modern processing power and was by necessity simplistic by modern standards.

The only dynamic between fast and slow units in Ashes is how long they take to travel.  It has zero bearing on whether they will instantly die, often before they engage in combat.  Combat is largely static, with the control group system negating even what little mobility they have and locking them down in formation.  As the game progresses, even T2 units become so much chaff, as orbitals and artillery blow them away en mass.

While the Quanta abilities are a nice addition, the system is over-simplified.  TA has tactical missile launchers, defenses to counter them, etcetera.  Quanta has a jammer structure which completely prevents the use of anything in it's radius, a binary can/can't state of existence that doesn't allow for any counter but conventional firepower.

Sins 1.0 released with three factions as well as pirates, abilities for I believe each of the 10 frigates in a faction, ignoring civilian frigates and fighters, in depth research trees for civilian and military, which unlocked ships, structures and abilities, as well as doing stat upgrades, random planet bonuses, and 5 leveling capital ships each with 4 level restricted improving abilities to select from.  Ashes, currently, has two factions, no random goodies of any kind in maps to discover, and 16 units per faction total, including the engineer.  I'm not seeing more content now, let alone at release.

Then how about a modding walkthrough that isn't "how to make a map" so people who are interested in turning it into a better game themselves, can see such magically non-obvious in the base game features that no one is aware of and has no idea how to play with.  Seriously, we were told it was going to be this mod friendly paradise, and between looking through the files and what little information has come out, I haven't seen it and it doesn't look like anyone else has or someone would at least be discussing making SupCom3 with it.

I actually like the game where it is.  It's really not bad, it's just not good, small maps are relatively fun.  It's not improving though, which is what really distresses me.  Bigger maps don't help when the game design already doesn't scale with the engine as it is now.  It just doesn't have any serious depth to what you can do.  You can spam generators to bludgeon armies to death with orbitals, and you can send your slow moving dreads around with their soon to be dead escorts to bludgeon defenses to death until they get smacked with an orbital strike and killed by bombers when their air defense is all dead.  The end game on a big map is... bluh?  If you're fixing this in escalation, then we might be going somewhere.  Otherwise it's just a really pretty, really boring slugfest.

Yeah, I've been kind of surprised by how little has been done with modding considering how much fanfare it seemed to be getting in the run-up to release.  When I finally decided to stop waiting on a fix for the end-game nuke problem that you highlighted, I was surprised that I had to figure out how to mod them out myself because nobody had even gotten 'that' far (incidentally, large games are, in my opinion, a little more satisfying without them though not having them really brings the army pathing issues and limited unit diversity into focus).  And even then, apparently, I can't use these mods in a co-op game with friends that I might want to try playing this game with so... that's unfortunate.

Anyway, I don't want to dogpile much further than that (though once again, I agree with roughly everything in that post) - I'm sure Stardock is, at least, aware of some of the biggest complaints at this point.  I think the upcoming mobile nullifiers are missing the mark a bit as far as fixing the nuke issue goes but hopefully, the rest of the Escalation package fills in some of the gaps.

In Supreme Commander, strategic zoom was navigation and a full screen minimap rolled into one, same with Sins of a Solar Empire.  Both are excellent games well beyond their peers, the zoom feature just being one of the things where they were ahead of their time.

It sounds like you should really pick up at least Forged Alliance, sounds like you'd enjoy it.

Upgradable defenses... If I recall correctly, the only upgradable defenses in supcom were shield generators (for 2 of the 3 vanilla races, I can't recall if seraphim shields were upgradable). And frankly, upgrades don't neccessarily make a game complex. I would argur that between a game with 3 different defenses and a game with one defense which has 5 squential upgrades (i.e. maintaining the general characteristic), the latter one is less complex.

I wouldn't say supcom ahd unlimited progression, but the limit was pretty damn high, which was amazing to me. And made it a lot less simple, you are right in that.

What I actually came here to post about: Strategic zoom.

Strategic zoom does not add complexity. When I first saw it in SupCom I started to love it. StratZoom is a tool to help you manage complexity, like a minimap helps you managing the complexity of a large playing field. If your game has a playing field that is only 3 screens wide and high, strategic zoom doesn't make it complex. It makes what is on the map easier to handle if properly supplemented with unit representation (icons when you zoom out).

Quite frankly, the only reason I can imagine speaking against strat zoom is how fast you can execute actions with it. Having played Starcraft 2 I would guess that I can be slightly faster in that framework with aminimap, than I would with StratZoom. But apart from that, I think StratZoom is a super elegant system almost any RTS can benefit from. No matter how simple or complex.

The existance of a feature doesn't make a game deeper. It makes it more complex.

Complexity is the amount of stuff you can learn (i.e. are not obscured too much) about game mechanics. The amount of upgrades, armor types, unit types, relations between upgrades (trees have many relations for example), is weather conditions, formations, etc.pp.

Depth I would measure by how many different situations you can expect to run into. A situation I would consider distinct from another if I have to act differently in the one as opposed to the other. Balance is vital here and makes the difference between a game being not only complex but also deep.

An example: Let's assume your game has 3 different units, than there are 7 different combinations of units (ignoring numbers per unit, which will ofc increase this number a lot). If one of these combinations just outright crushes all the others, you have a game which has a complexity of 7 unit combinations, you could be facing, but a depth of 1 situation, since the crushing combination is the thing you are doing regardless of what your enemy throws at you.

edit; I should possibly also add, that I am not intending to be nitpicky over the words complex and deep here. My point is, that it is for a designer to see the complexity going into a game, but to the player, the depth coming out of the game is the relevant quantity. I use the two words to describe two very different things here.

This looks really interesting. I've been enjoying the campaign and I may try the multiplayer if I ever get time. You guys seem to be doing a pretty good job building Ashes. Keep up the good work! Escalation seems like a really solid expansion.