There are two complaints in this thread and they are being treated as one. Disliking the slot restriction is fair. Being told where things can go, and having your production spread out as a result, is a real thing to object to and it has nothing to do with nostalgia. Bringing back base building is a different ask, and that one I would push back on. I put a great many hours into the first game and the base was never the interesting part of it. It was somewhere you left. What the
Arrow
The cadence point is right and it is the part of this that usually goes unsaid. Free to play does not only change the till, it signs you up for a content calendar, and in an RTS almost every addition is a balance change somewhere else. Where I would disagree is treating ladder population as the thing free entry buys you. That holds at the 1v1 end. It does not hold at the large-scale end, which is where I live. In Ashes my hours went to skirmish against the AI and to co-op, and the 1v1
Two factions for the test means UEF and PHC, so the one I have the most hours against is sitting this one out. Substrate was half the matchup in the original game, and it was announced back in March as the third faction here. I read this as testing the pair with the least multiplayer data behind it rather than the pair people already know how to play. Fine by me. A stability and balance test wants the matchup nobody has settled yet, not the one with ten years of habits attached to it.<