Recent reviews by Khan

As a fan of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, I really looked forward the first AotS when it was announced and was sad to see that it didn't quite live up to the expectations. When I found out that a standalone expansion had been released I was skeptical, but decided to give this one a shot. I was pleasantly surprised.

The resource system is similar to SupCom except the "energy" resource is replaced by "radioactives" which also need extractors built on certain locations. This does encourage you to be strategic about the spots you take, but I honestly don't think too much about it unless I need to. As a nitpick though I often find that the regions don't yield quite enough and they are too sparse. Often I have loads of metal but absolutely no radioactives which completely stalls my production. Whether it's just me or the game I can't quite tell.

It's sort of like a mix between SupCom:FA and SupCom 2, in a good way. SupCom:FA was very deep and fairly slow, but was difficult to get into and it was incredibly easy to mess up early. Especially if you played against someone who was somewhat decent. SupCom 2 was way more casual to the extreme. It was fun for short little games with friends but it was in no way deep enough to keep me for any longer time. Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is a good mix. It's fairly deep with several tiers of units, high unit caps (is there even any maximum? I have no clue!), runs incredibly well, has turrets that actually do something, and is not too difficult to pick up and play. Game can last for a long time though, depending on the size of your map. So if you enjoyed the long games of SupCom:FA then you may enjoy this.

The AI is pretty good. The difficulty of a game depends highly on the size of the map you're playing on (and yes, they can be pretty big!). A big map is probably more representative of what the AI is capable of since it gets time to set up properly, and then they can get pretty tough, even on normal. I recommend that you practice getting a base up and running fast on small maps and that you play with the map "exposed" on large maps. Exposed only means that the map is not black, there is still fog of war. I find that it's too much random chance playing on a map where you can't see anything, but some may disagree with me.

All in all, I'm happy with my purchase. I know that it won't replace SupCom:FA to a lot of people but to me and my circle of friends this game fits more nicely into a saturday night session.