please add 4V4 maps,for testing....

One quality of life item I want to see added asap is better hotkey support. For example, there should be a hotkey for enabling/disabling repeat on factories. Also, the ability to remap hotkeys would be very welcomed.

I think QoL items like these can go a long way toward enhancing the user experience and improving the perceived quality of the game.

Well, I think the main thing that is turning off new players is this game's similarity to Supreme Commander and appearance that this game is, at present, a less complete and complex version of that (although I think you are all painfully aware of that). 

How do you deal with that? Well, I think there is probably no slam dunk answer. I think you can maybe do a more rigorous job of publicizing the fact that there is still a lot of work going on with the game, but I doubt that will really sway people.  I know there is a roadmap for Ashes, but really it's a little too abstract to really sway people.  I think Ashes is suffering from the appearance of being streamlined SupCom, and that appearance while not totally accurate, isn't totally wrong either. People who love SupCom/FA love how barque and byzantine they are, and I think the natural comparison between the games is going to hurt Ashes (which I think is well on the way to excellence) until Ashes has something in it that obviously distinguishes it. If you have anything in the works that gives the gameplay a truly unique identity, something that takes it beyond big armies duking it out, I would reveal it!

I think new players need a lot more info in game. For example you should be able to see the cost of your units or buildings without pulling your mouse over them in the build tab. You can add the cost (whole cost and cost per sec) on to the 'build unit" button. For example when im in construct tab, i should be able to see how much metal/radioactives/logictics every unit i can build will cost me. You can also add a per second cost somewhere near the full cost (same as when you pull your mouse over the button. That would make new players life a little bit easier.

Another thing that would make new players life easier is some clarity on units damage output, for example now you have units with 1-4 weapon types and there are a lot of info on dps. Its confusing for me at least. But it isnt clear enough which of these weapons are used against which types of units (sure it is mentioned in the description, but you have to actually look for it and figure it out). You could clarify damage output of different units and make clearer statements on which type of units is vulnerable to this unit and which one is a counter to this unit.  

The economy tab should be upgraded. Now you only see total capacity of your recources and income rate (or deduction). We actually need a quanta income rate added per second. I would love to have some sort of advanced economy tab, when i could see what are my resources spent on. For example if i build 3 t1 units, 1 t2 unit and 1 dread and a few buildings, i would really love to see how much resources are spent on that. For example make somethink like that:

Metal Capacity = 500 -24 (resource flow)

Brutes (3) production -8

Nemesis production -4

Dread production -10

Turret/factory/orbital relay production -2 

That would actually help new players maintain their economy much better and actually see their mistakes on abusing their economy. For me, when i started to play ashes, was a pain to figure out where i overspend my resources and why there is always a -30 metal on the tab. 

Another thing i may suggest is more clarifications on orbitals. Now we have something like "spawn a carving turret/avatar/drone swarm/engeneer/chtulhu" at target location. But cmon guys i do want to know what i am getting for my quanta when i summon my chtulhu . Add some info on unit stats for example damage output/functions. 

And please consider doing something with double node capture in the beginning. On many maps it is impossible to double capture two nodes with first 2 engies and thus phc are put  in much worse conditions than subs. Because subs can open with a single node and still have decent economy, phc on the other hand looses a lot of their potential when starting with 1 node instead of 2. I would really like some choices being made whether to go for metal or radioactive first capture instead of obligatory both. 

Besides for a game that positions itself like "massive strategy game" you need to tone down early game agression. I rarely see games going far enought to actually spawn a dread, because nowadays it is far more profitable to go for early air harras or push, than to tech up for late game. I suggest put some built in AA weapons in to nexus so that early air would die in agony while trying to attack nexus. However in mid/late game it will have almost no effect due to it being countered by large amounts of units. 

P.s. Brad i have a question, have you considered something like PVE content for ashes? For example starcraft 2 came up with allied commander mode, where 2 people are matched to fight on one side against an overwhelming computer with specific missions and scenarios. I really enjoyed that game mode and i do think that RTS needs to focus on such game modes to attract more casual people to the genre. For example a lot of RTS players just hate to play AGAINST other people (lack of confidence i think) but on the other hand LOVE to play with someone together against AI.

Hello

Can't tell you what puts other players off, but I can tell what puts be off this game Well, aside of no Linux support and no Vulkan for my GPU, so even lack of Linux support is irrelevant.

The main issue is, and IMO, it's quite fixable - massive scale RTS games are pretty damn different. And I have no idea what kind of massive-scale RTS game AotS is. Is it like some Total Annihilation mods (like recent Planetary Annihilation is) with dozens of hardly distinguishable units for no apparent reason? Is it frantically fast-paced? Does it have naval warfare? What kind of story is expected? Multiplayer? Etc, etc...

Sure, most of this information is diggable - there is a bunch of PR-buzz on Steam store page promising you glory and enlightenment, but who buys that. There are FAQ's, but who reads them. There are tons of subjective reviews that needs to be read, understood and cross-matched to get pure facts out of them. There are streams and lets' plays that are usually some kind of horrible mess that you must suffer through bad jokes and annoying comments of a player who is dumb and unfocused enough to miss out some obvious things you see on his screen, etc. But - that's require some effort and we all understand that an effort required to understand what such a complex game is isn't small by itself. It doesn't get any smaller by all this issues. So, that's what keeps me off - I know about this game. I kinda want to try it out, but I don't know what it is and I don't have much motivation to get know.

So, what's the solution? Well - give me the facts! In simple and compact form. IMO it would be great to see some kind of "concept tree" of kinds. Like - what's AotS about? What's the highest concepts a player will be dealing with while playing the game? That's probably something along "Building", "Fighting", "Story" and "Multiplayer". These are not strictly separate, but they shoudn't be. It's just a way to classify the information, so I can only jump first at what I care the most - would it be Story or Building or whatever. So what's "Fighting" about - "Control", "Transportation" maybe? "Units", etc. What's about "Control" - well, that's your "Meta-Units" thing for once. "Automation" - that's a big topic you may learn a great deal about from Planetary Annihilation discussions, etc. It should also has something like "Big scale, low-rate, decisive gameplay" - which means that you are operating at high level, makes decisions rather infrequently (in general), but they have drastic effects. Unlike, say, Starcraft where you make lots of decisions like "which skill to use" or "should I move this unit a bit further away", but making a mistake isn't usually that much punishing than a strategic level mistake. Of course, Starcraft has a strategic layer too, as well as AotS has some about of micro, but that's about generic concepts.

So, once you have such tree of reasonably high-level concepts (there is no need to go below "Meta-Units", for instance, so it would hardly be deeper than 4-5 levels) you can present them as a web-page with clickable short labels with somewhat illustrative text. For instance, if you have thing like "Large-scale" there should be an illustration of how much "large" is: "approx. 10000 units per battle at once side mid-game!" for example. And a screenshot with lots off units from the strategic view. So you can get a taste of how exactly "large" it is.

Such web-page will make a LOT in terms of pre-purchase understanding of what it is, while not being particularly hard to make. It will take some time to design an exact tree and choose words carefully, but I suppose you already have some kind of design documents internally which may just already have a similar structure. The emphasis is not on current state of the game, but rather concepts and how you think things should be. So, for instance, if there is no naval fleet, but you intend to add it some time in future and already have an idea of how it will play out in conjuction of other forces - that's a great tool to show it too. And with actual information. So you don't need to check if this review was made a year ago and since then a couple of new races were added already.

For a more specific folks, like SupCom fans it would be nice to see what long-standing issues SupCom had (like air supremacy in conjunction with rather boring hit-or-miss air gameplay) and how these issues are addressed in AotS as a separate "comparison sheet" of kinds. It may not mention SupCom directly as it might be problematic from legal part, but hey - people will understand. At least it would be nice to have kind of high-level comparison between different styles of RTS games - CnC-alike, Starcraft-alike, TA-alike, SupCom-alike (which is, IMO, very different from TA). What is different, what is similar.

- For me I really do not like the look of the white circular graphic which is used through the tutorial and campaign:

Sorry to sound harsh but it looks amateurish to me, certainly programmer art rather than an artist's. I think it gives a poor first impression and I think it needs to be re-done.

- I think the ability to speed up the game or slow it down needs to be slightly more obvious, seen a fair few reviews where people complain about the pace and I think a lot of people miss it. Just making the + and - bigger and adding: "Game Speed: Normal", instead of just the word "Normal" would be better and more easily taken in than it currently is.

- When you quit a skirmish you should be able to "quit/return to lobby" like you can already in a MP game. The game does now remember what your last lobby settings were, even after a restart, so that is good.

- Another thing people talk about is text legibility so that is something you could look at. I think making the current "continuous build" and "pause factory" tick buttons just buttons with no words would be better. Create appropriate icons and place them above the box where you actually select the units that you want to build in the factory. I realise this one might not be quite such a quick fix as you'd have to educate people through the Tutorial or the beginning of the campaign about what the buttons mean. The current small, easily missed in the moment tick boxes aren't ideal though.   

- Ideally the beginning of the tutorial would be made a little more exciting, though I think a fair few people skip it perhaps? But if it is the first thing they try and they are only going to give the game 40 minutes to decide whether they will keep or refund the game, then it could do with being a little more punchy. (At this point I should say I haven't finished the tutorial so maybe it gets better, as i quit after 5-10 minutes being already familiar with the game mechanics by the time the Tutorial became available)

- I don't think the Substrate energy system with the Capacitor is explained anywhere. It is one of the nice differentiators between the two factions, but it is poorly sold. Even worse, people jump into a MP game without knowing the mechanic and do badly and grow frustrated while thinking the game is bugged when their Reapers just sit there and don't fire back.

- Bug hunting! Especially crashing to desktop, MP problems, and infinite load problems. Crashing fixes are key though.

That's all I have at the moment.

(Getting 4v4 in would be good and customisable keys would also go down very well, but I realise they are not quick fixes)