I only have issues when I get to 13-15k. The game slows down significantly no matter what is being rendered on screen (more testing is required to confirm the cause of the slowdown).

Edit: The slow-down is occurring when my GTX970 exceeds 3.5GB VRAM usage as expected.

Zooming out with the map covered with battles does not crash or cause the game to run any slower for me.

"lol.  

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

Yeah, no.  This is from my hours of experience in 10+ different RTS games.  In every single one that didn't have strat zoom, I felt handicapped.  Ashes included.  No Strat zoom is comparable to telling someone they should wear blinders on each side of their face to help them focus on what's in front.  Obviously not wearing blinders is better, because you get a choice.

"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. "

And this is where I stop you and laugh, as I realize you've never taken up SupCom seriously.  Go play the game for a few hundred hours against decent players and tell me again how little your unit comp matters so long as you have the generic *ground-pounder* or *shoot air* or *shoot farther* guys in your army.  You have no idea.

You also have little room here, as Ashes is even more bland when it comes to unit composition.  You've got medics and AA in both factions. Of the eight cruisers, there are only five different types:  Heavy-killer, Light-killer, Artillery/Anti-building, Drone, and AA/AntiDrone.   SupCom has four factions, and their unit compositions all differ based on who or what they are fighting.  

Second, lose tactical awareness? Frogboy, you didn't magically take away the lower zoom levels by adding in the higher cap. At least, I assume you won't.  It would be weird if you did.  If I want the tactical awareness, I can take the quarter second to zoom in.   I am at the Strat Zoom level so I can see the whole thing unfolding, not so I can watch one battle.  I wanna see my radar coverage, I want to order my aircraft sitting in my base to head to the opposite side of the map in a single click. Etc.

"That can't easily be represented when looking at."

Alright.  I've had this experience in Ashes plenty, but I think that's more of a texture design issue than anything else.  So, what part of SupCom's maps made height differences confusing?  It might just be that I have experience with the game, but it is super easy to see where the high ground/cliffs are from a distance.  Perhaps ya'll could learn from SupCom in that regard?

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

Yep.  Here's a video that I'm in, playing the game with some friends. We may have upped the AI too much and got smashed.  Lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POFV6kUUDWU

Compared to PA, this game has *okay* sized fights.  Massive isn't exactly the term I'd use when we are only dealing with a few square kilometers of screen space at a time.

"I really enjoyed this part:

with

In the same post."

Go ask John Comes. I was a complete asshole to him back in the day when he was doing his best to not balance PA.  Not proud of it, but I'm no fanboy.

I know where PA went right because that was the thing friends and strangers all agreed upon.  It's not my opinion - it's what I gathered after asking around.  That engine works.  The lobby, however, does not.  For example.

"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."

Enter SupCom, the literal antithesis to everything you just said.  It's got unit composition management and strategic zoom.  It's also in real time.  Was it super profitable? Sorta.  They made a second one (a shitshow, but they made one).

"You want an engine that will last for years?  Build PA, but fix its flaws and terrible marketing strategy

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

Great! Be sure to tell that one to the young, brave new programmers with great ideas that will move the RTS genre out of the 3D 1980s.  I'm sure they'll love it

25,000 units at once:

25,000 units, or 25,000 logistics. There were quite a lot of dreadnoughts and cruisers so the unit count would be be quite a bit lower than the logistics.

Sorry to be nit-picky.

If you guys want to go down the "experienced player path" I'll add my own impressions.

I've been playing RTS since Dune II and its more obscure but infinitely deeper contemporary, Fantasy Siege by Mindcraft, which in the same year was already dealing with mixed armies, bullet tracking, ammunition supply and semi-destroyable environment.

There is very little I haven't played as far as RTS goes and very few that I still play, some even after 15+ years.

As for modern games, seriously, using PA as sense of scale example is laughable, please stop using it as it damages your credibility.

AOTS is NOT SupcomFA (and I would love another Supcom).

AOTS is NOT PA (and I would like to see that idea with proper sense of scale and execution, not 5 minutes to round an entire world scale).

AOTS is DEFINITELY NOT Starcraft (although it would be interesting to see a good take at the RTS/RPG potential)

The game has its own soul, its own gameplay and a flavour that will definitely not fully developed at release (I'm not calling the game unfinished!) but will take a few expansions/sequels to fully release its potential as its normal with a game this complex.

Making innovation in RTS is hard, VERY hard, so hard that in a decade you can count RTS introducing something truly new in one hand, the genre spaces from Battlezone/Hostile Waters to Supcom and having something distinctive and functional at the same time takes lots of trial and error.

If there is one thing that I'd ask to Frogboy is not "make it like game X" which is basically humiliating to the toil and creativity of the dev team but rather to try to make the game engine as open and moddable as possible so that it will also be a beautifull canvass for modders to experiment with and provide feedback through their own applied creativity.