draginol: It's fairly similar to Sins in that it is slower paced and the economy streams in (though it's radioactives intestead of crystals). The capital ships are called Dreadnoughts and the Empire tree is only used for control groups.
Cheers!
Tarm: How's the maps and therefore the strategical part?
Sins had clear chokepoints and important strategical areas while Ashes seems like one whole open area to fight for. Is that so?
I have attached one of the more obvious maps to get the point across more easily. As you can see from the picture, if you are dark blue (Top right) and red wants to invade you, he will have to break through from point
B to point
A. This is because you will reach point
A a lot faster than he could reach it, measuring the distance.
So you could turtle up and have a chokepoint at that location. The other case is also true, as dark blue, you could take point
B before red can even get to it, guarding point
A, however you may find yourself flanked from two or even three positions.
This is one of many maps and I just used this one as it provides a clear example of a chokepoint.
On almost all maps (There's 2 or 3 completely open maps I believe), there's chokepoints where the enemy will have to break through to get to your other terrain. Some are more vulnerable (Such as it can be attacked from multiple sides) but as an advantage to that disadvantage, you are on elevated ground, so you'll have a much easier time fending off whatever's coming your way.
So while AotS doesn't have a whole lot of "clear-cut" chokepoints as shown in the example here, there are a lot of "strong points" that are hard and/or costly to break through. So the enemy has a flanking advantage but will lose a lot of units to your comparably few. Perhaps this means that you can use the bigger part of your army to take 4 points while the enemy only painfully took 1 (even if it's a strong point, 4 > 1).
There's a ton of other factors that makes something a strong or a weak point, and there can be workarounds. These workarounds are usually costly but can offer really great results (High cost - high reward moves). For example, an enemy could scout the side of your base with a scouting plane and teleport in an orbital army to take spots that have no defense whatsoever or cripple the production. This can cause the enemy to draw away some of his army from his "strong point" leaving it vulnerable. You lose the orbital army (Typically small) and the points you've taken with it, but in return the enemy lost his full advantage point.
The game may seem quite simple on paper but it's quite deep on a strategic level. For every advantage you can exploit disadvantages. For people on equal skill levels, it's mostly about predicting what the enemy will try do next and counter it OR strike before the enemy strikes next, causing him to rethink his strategy.
I could go on and on but I probably got the point across. :)
