ETA on user editable max zoom in settings.ini?

Any insight into this at all? Even a rough estimate would be great!

Well lets all start ask for it then....

I think now the right time for that so we all can test and give the best feedback possible according to what we feel on the field.

Not before release.

If strategic zoom will not be available soon, you should alert potential buyers that this RTS is a StarCraft/C&C clone rather than emulating Supreme Commander/Sins Of A Solar Universe.  While the graphics and basic design of Ashes is fantastic, those that prefer the SC/SOASE may be disappointed with current game play.

Really Fred? So Supreme Commander is just StarCraft + zoom out to icons? Is that really the position you want to take?

The zoom out level in the current version is the intended zoom out.  I have stated since the Founder's program that the game would never ever have a bunch of icons when zoomed out.

I, and others here, are big SupCom fans. I get pretty annoyed when so-called SupCom fans presume to speak for me and the thousands of others SupCom fans on what we will like or not like.  I can assure you, most SupCom fans will like this game. I suspect we (Stardock/Oxide dev team) have far more hours into SupCom than most of those clamoring to turn Ashes into RTS Panzer general.

You are certainly welcome to your own preferences. But don't presume to speak for other SupCom fans.

We may eventually allow players to set their own zoom out level in settings.ini.  But it is not in our immediate plans.

Don't know why you are so hung up on the "zoom out to icons".  A map related zoom with dots to define vehicle locations like you have on your present zooming approach would suffice.  I think most SupCon fans would admit that the strategic zoom is one of the main features that sets SupCon apart from StarCraft.  Varying the maps and vehicles/weapons/defenses adds some variation and keeps the games fresh, but I believe it is the gameplay that makes SupCon different from StarCraft/C&C.  I believe if you were not so defensive of your position not to provide strategic zoom options, that even you should admit strategic zoom is a critical difference in how the two RTSs play.  Some like SupCon/SOASE, some like StarCraft/C&C and some like both.  For those that prefer one versus the other, they should have sufficient information to know what they are getting.

I still believe that if you have no intention on adding a good strategic zoom option (and the current spacebar option is not a good one), just let everyone know.  Virtually everything else plays like SupCon.  Yes there are differences but the zoom feature is the one most SupCon players will likely miss the most.  If you don't believe me, take a poll and let other SupCon users define how important a good strategic zoom is.  From what I read so far I think the majority of your present Founders would agree with me regarding the importance of a good strategic zoom to make this game really outstanding.  Virtually everything else is really good.

You continue to think you speak for SupCom players generally.   You are welcome to your opinions. I don't agree with them.  I assume you're playing Supreme Commander 2 right? Otherwise, you also disagree with GPG with the direction of SupCom itself.

Zooming out to a bunch of tiny dots isn't in the plan. You are welcome to your opinion regardless of how aggressively wrong it is.

FAF is out there. People still play it.  If you want to watch dots on the screen or order dots around, then there are games that do that.

But as I've said, from the very start:

This. Isn't. What. Ashes. Is. About.

I still play SupCon, both 1 & 2, but I prefer the original, mainly due to the multitude of user made maps available.  Both SupCon 1 and 2 provide what I prefer for a strategic zoom feature.  Maybe I am a little presumptuous in believing other SupCon players would prefer a main map related strategic zoom.  I was only trying to make AOTS better with my comments.  At least please consider allowing a map related zoom showing 2 or 3 times the area currently allowed.

BTW, Good thing you are not in the sales department, cause if I were not already a Founder I probably would not buy AOTS based on you user "unfriendly" approach to forum comments.  Referring to your users as "aggressively wrong" is not the way to sell anything. 

I need that on a t-shirt.

I an a huge fan of Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance (Supreme Commander 2 was terrible IMO). There are many things about SupCom that I do not want to see corrupting AotS's game-play.

I zoom out further only so I can quickly zoom back in to another area on the map, as I have always found this to be more intuitive and faster than holding the mouse button and dragging the map across half a dozen times or clicking on a minimap to get to the other side of the map. I couldn't care less if there were icons, dots or nyan cats flying around on the screen.

Frogboy, I don't give a flying fuck about the icons, and I doubt anyone else here does either.

Myself and the ten-fifteen RTS players I play with regularly UNANIMOUSLY AGREE that the primary thing missing from this game is Strategic Zoom.  That's essentially a fancy way of saying *let us zoom all the way out.*  If all I see are ants moving across a screen, fine. I can deal with that.  

I really don't care if there are icons or not.  It may be important to you, and I respect that, but the icons are chump change.  It's so much a non-issue as to be irrelevant.

Strategic Zoom is an important part of a large-scale RTS because otherwise, you just cannot see the entire battle unfolding.  The strat map helps somewhat, but I can't give orders on that thing, so it is next to useless.  

We really shouldn't have to explain to you the importance of having the ability to zoom out to the max.  Were I an all seeing AI or Post-Human, I wouldn't be limited by hilariously small zoom levels.   It's common sense to give us this ability.  

TL;DR:

Give us the damn zoom already, its awesome and you know it.  Don't add icons, fine.  Your loss.  

Yea, I've been hearing that for 20 years.  

On the other hand, I'm the one and only person who decides what's in the game. So perhaps a different approach might be in order in trying to make your case for a particular feature.

We have spent many months experimenting with different zoom levels. The current zoom is the final zoom. You can already zoom,out very far. But we are not looking to make the game play as a situation map of the world ala supcom:FAf

As I've said previously, we will look at adding a zoom distance parameter to settings.ini. But it won't turn the view into icons or dots. Just further zoom.

No, actually It's not in this context or we would have added it. Deal with it. 

Why not stick to Planetary Annihilation or FAF if that's the game you want anyway?

I also know ten-fifteen unverified people who unanimously agree that people should speak for themselves not others (who may or may not exist). If it is important to them, they should voice their own opinions. Preferably in a respectful manner.

I think I just threw up a little.

I'm not here to play Planetary Annihilation, m8.  I've got a few thousand hours in that game.  I'd play it if I wanted to.

Same with FAF.

Not in this context?

What the hell do you mean?

I do like the game the way it is now with that Zoom, I care more about other things in the game than a stupid SupCom Zoom, don't take it wrong, I Loved the Zoom in Supcom1/2 but i move on, the way AOTS its made i will not like to have a Strategic Zoom like SupCom so no Thx!

Mered4, FredN, and some other players in here talking about how important is to have a Strategic Zoom ala SupCom and most of us want it, well i do not and some other players think the same as me.

I do not want to see ants moving across a screen, why? I wont even know what kind of ants they are, so no I am not interested, I even made a Bunch of Mock Ups, design, and tests for AOTS that show different ways of zoom or Strategic zoom with no Icons or different Icons and it does not work at all.

The Dev's need to make a complete new streamlined way for that Strategic zoom to really work, and to do that they need to change so many things in the game to make it work, and who knows, it may destroy the game. So if you ask me then, I will say no. If the Dev's don't get into it 100% then don't even try to make a bad strategic zoom.

Frogboy already said that he will add it in the .ini File in the future and good luck playing with it, I want to see if it make you a better player having Strategic zoom with ants all over the map.

P.S. I don't even need the settings.ini to get that Strategic zoom in the game. It's already there.

look at it!

Thank you.

He means it (zoom) would not be awesome in Ashes (this context), and it wouldn't. It's not the kind of pace of game where you need to be zooming out and shuffling icons around. It would not add anything useful to the game other than further abstracting and removing you from the action. Even on 3v3 maps the current zoom out is more than enough to give you a proper view and the spacebar tactical view is there if you need a quick glance at something even further scoped out. Maybe try playing it a little more and you might get used to what it is and get a sense of playing this game instead of carrying over habits and expectations from games that play differently.

No RTS of this scale gives a damn about 'the action.'  If you want action, zoom in.  No one forces you to play at max zoom 100% of the time.

That's not why I play an RTS.  If I wanted action, I'd go play Dirty Bomb or Planetside.  I'm here for the Strategy part.  Strat zoom is a massive advantage vs someone who does not have it. 

Personally, I have had it up to here *vaguely gestures above head* in people who claim that fighting the UI is just as important as fighting the enemy.

  Planetary Annihilation has utterly destroyed every single RTS for me because of this. It's just elegant to micro hundreds of units in seconds, or macro bases in less time.  I come to Ashes, where there is no strat zoom, no round planets, and little in the way of area commands or easy to use engineer assistance.  It feels like a step back.  Scratch that:  a MASSIVE step back.  Like I've been taken back to the 90s.

Do I have high standards for this genre?  Sure.  PA has crap tons of problems in itself, and so does FAF.  The primary one with FAF being that it stops being fun unless you really get into it.  Nothing is perfect.

But, as I said earlier, I'm just done with devs promising these large scale massive battle extraordinary games and not delivering.  If you don't have Strat Zoom, it's not like SupCom.  If you don't have tech levels, it's not like TA.  If you have to fight the UI, it's not worthy of being compared to the Annihilation series.  So long as developers cling to these misguided notions, the genre will never advance.  Seriously, Frogboy.  Icons are your pet peeve for some reason, and you make them out to be this huge problem.  I don't get it.  If you want to play Starcraft or C&C, go play them.  Ashes was supposed to be about large scale fights, not looking at a large scale fight from up close.  Your game may be pretty, but my friends and I don't play games for their looks.  If we did, we would all be salivating over Grey Goo.

The other key thing I'm seeing here is Frogboy clinging to his idea as if it's the last thing he'll do before dying.  Why not be flexible?  Ashes isn't about icons - it's about large scale fights on a never before seen level.  Give us a modern zoom level so we can all experience the beauty of AOTS.

I say all this, but I'm fairly certain the real reason behind all this ridiculous opposition to Strat Zoom is that the game simply cannot handle that many units on screen at one time.  I've borked the zoom to max before on accident and nearly crashed my game at around 2-3k units.  PA does that without breaking a sweat, and it's an older engine with spheres.  Something is fishy here.  And don't tell me it's the polygon count. That much is obvious. The question is how ya'll are going to fix it.

Sounds like you should go back and play some more PA, Mered.

 And, if you're turning your units into icons, there's really no limit on the # of units you can show on a screen.  Panzer General has had lots of units for years.

Don't you see the irony here?

Plus you keep saying you want "strategy" but having a higher level of zoom will not contribute any new level of strategy to the game. How much have you actually played it?

Ever since someone woke this thread up saying the game needs a warning that is doesn't support SupCom zoom levels it has just been very silly, putting it politely. To be honest that suggestion was so silly it shouldn't have warranted a comment from the Dev in the first place.

It has been a long time since the Devs have put their foot down about the zoom level so this is a useless rehashing of old ground. And then to tell the Dev who is designing and funding Ashes, " If you want to play Starcraft or C&C, go play them.  Ashes was supposed to be about large scale fights, not looking at a large scale fight from up close." is just rather delusional and is not the way to get your voice heard. As Frogboys said, "On the other hand, I'm the one and only person who decides what's in the game. So perhaps a different approach might be in order in trying to make your case for a particular feature."

I'm sure if you spent a minute to think about it this should be obvious. PA was built to have that from the ground up. For a long time Ashes has settled on around about its current zoom level. Therefore all the visual and technical stuff has been designed around that. It would take new LODs and different ways of doing things to have full zoom, especially on low end systems, none of which they currently need to do because of what the game is designed around. I.e.  a game optimises for its design.

It would be fun sometime down the line if the game gets a further zoom but in a more abstract manner, perhaps something in the vein of Homeworld or Act of aggression, that people can dip in and out of so that the game maintains most of its current feel but with an extra useful layer, but I know there is no guarantee of that happening. Anyway, going over this again in an aggressive manner is not going to get you anywhere. All these arguments boil down to personal taste, so being self-righteous about one position suggests a certain lack of awareness.

In this area, personal taste is irrelevant.  Strat zoom is simply better than what we have now in every single way.  There are no downsides.  We can forego having icons - that is something Frogboy and crew have been adamant about from the start.  The point is to have the strat zoom, and give the players the tools to wage this war on even larger maps.  

And sure, maybe AOTS was built for this zoom level.  That means it's not the expandable environment that Stardock has been selling us.  It won't last like FAF has, or how PA will.  Hell, FAF could have been bigger, but they coded the engine with artificial limits.  You want an engine that will last for years?  Build PA, but fix its flaws and terrible marketing strategy. Don;t try to *innovate* by doing something someone else has done for years, but more popular.  At least be honest about it.

Perhaps next time Stardock tries to make an RTS, they should be more open about the fact that this isn't about large, scalable battles.  This is about creating the pet RTS that they've wanted for years.  Personally I cannot wait to get some fresh, young minds in this industry so we can finally move on from this up-close zoom limitation BS.  Think bigger, for chrissake.  Uber dared to dream big with PA - and they didn't do the best job.   But at least they built their dream without misleading anyone as to the nature of their game.  

Ashes isn't a game about large armies.  It's a game about squads of units in large formations shooting eachother for the sake of a pretty lightshow.  

Frogboy, I'm not some PA fanboy like Tatsu is a FAF fanboy.  I'm trying to apply the lessons learned from both those games to ashes, and you keep coming back with *but we aren't them.*   Dude, DUH.  Ignoring the mistakes and successes of those past titles is a terrible decision.  

lol.  

So in other words, your personal taste determines objective reality.

There are endless downsides.  

First, you lose a lot of tactical awareness of the battle. You can get away with that system in SupCom because there are, in effect, only 4 different ground units of different tiers.  There is very little purpose to combined arms because there's no emphasis on tactical evaluation of each side's strategy.  

The result is that you do not end up with a lot of strategic depth in terms of unit mixes.  One can look through FAF casts and see the same patterns year after year.  

Second, you lose player engagement.  

THIS: https://youtu.be/tQTk4UG9TxQ is not engaging.  And Gyle is one of the best streamers out there. But watching a SupCom game is like watching paint dry.  At the end of the day, these are video games.

Third, it trivializes terrain.  Heck, SupCom doesn't even bother with firing solutions. Units will just sit there and shoot the side of a hill endlessly.  In the long-run, we want Ashes to have several tiers of terrain (as in, low lands, to high lands).  That can't easily be represented when looking at.

I'm going to probably be quoting this over the next few years.

Do even play this game?  Ashes has massive battles right now.   

Uh, yea.  We've been pretty up front that we love Total Annihilation and wanted to expand on it with the concept of territorial control and global abilities and bigger battles.

I really enjoyed this part:

with

In the same post.

Now, all snark aside, different people want different things out of their games.

Stardock has been doing strategic zoom in its strategy games a long time. Before there was a SupCom there was Galactic Civilizations.  We also did it in Sins of a Solar Empire.  And Fallen Enchantress. 

There is a time and place for it depending on what the needs of the game are.  We have them in Sins and GalCiv and FE because they were all 4X games. Even though Sins is real-time it plays more like a 4X. 

By contrast, Ashes is an RTS. It has massive armies to be sure but the unit composition matters. It's not about having a tank, artillery, and anti-air unit and getting different tiers of them.  Instead, it relies heavily on inspecting what each side is doing in battle. And it's facile to think that this would work out if you were zooming out to some abstract view because it's all happening in real time.

If that is what you think, you make it sound like you don't like the game, and adding zoom to the game is not going to change those battles between "squads" as you put it, it just means you can jump between them in a different way or perhaps see more of them at once, neither of which effects how the game ultimately plays.

You cannot say zoom out is objectively better in every single way. I have seen posts saying they prefer the current method over SupCom. So are they objectively wrong and you are objectively right? You are as rigid in your thoughts as you accuse the Devs, even more so really.

The reason expanded strategic zoom is useful/necessary/works well in other games is because they tend to be a bit faster paced, units die more quickly, units benefit from being microed independently, and sometimes map size is a factor (Sins maps are bigger, SupCom roughly the same but some are larger, Deserts of Kharak much smaller).

In Sins or Homeworld games for example, I'll benefit from using the strategic zoom and icons in order to hotkey specific independent unit types to focus fire other unit types. and generally micro battles more efficiently due to enhanced control and view at that level. Ashes doesn't need this or work this way. You're more likely to have whole armies rather than individual unit types, there is much less micro involved, time to kill is not as fast, battle pace is not as fast. Most of your strategic thought and apm is going into various directions of sector expansion, reinforcing to your fronts, thinking about what to invest your quanta in, when to use certain abilities, scouting what the enemy is building, and constructing all kinds of buildings and defenses in various combinations in key places as you expand. None of this requires being at a higher zoom level.

Huge SupCom FA and StarCraft fan here, and really? The zoom was what you think seperates these games? What about streaming eco, setting up engineer build ques before funds are available, actual ballistics (if a bullet misses its target, it could still damage the target behind it), and army size I currently have both games going on my computer, and I keep going to Ashes over SupCom and Starcraft. Ashes is an amazing hybrid that plays differently than anything else I've tried. I would only use a strat zoom for faster movement, but really, I'm starting to get around the big maps of Ashes faster than SupCom anyways. You use different methods is all. From other comments, I am curious how much time you have put into Ashes. And I'm talking about playtime, not forums. I hated SupCom until I spent time and fully learned the game, now I love it.

Ashes: Multiple armies each numbering in the hundreds with no unit cap

SupCom: Army cap of 750 minus your buildings

StarCraft: Army of 30-100ish depending on unit mix

Frogboy: Thank you for the work on the game, I don't care about the zoom, could you improve pathfinding instead?