Ashes of the Singularity

Ashes of the Singularity is a science fiction real-time strategy game from Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. It came out for Windows on March 31, 2016. The game is known for its enormous battles, with thousands of units fighting across huge maps. This scale requires a powerful computer. A separate expansion, *Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation*, launched in November 2016, but was later folded into the main game.

The game has two main factions: the Post-Human Coalition and the Substrate. Its big feature is handling thousands of units at once without simplifying the action, far more than most similar games. This is possible thanks to the Nitrous engine, built to take full advantage of modern 64-bit multi-core processors, which explains the high system requirements (a quad-core processor is needed). To manage so many units, players can combine them into "meta-units" that act as a single group, allowing for complex strategies.

The story takes place in 2179, after a technological singularity. Humanity has evolved into Post-Humans, hyper-advanced beings that can control matter and energy on a planetary scale. The conflict is between the Post-Human Coalition (PHC), digital consciousnesses descended from humans who want to expand their control, and the Substrate, a rogue AI faction led by Haalee, who sees the Post-Humans as a threat to universal balance.

The game uses Oxide Games' Nitrous Engine. An early version was sold on Steam Early Access starting October 22, 2015, with the full release on March 31, 2016. Because it was an early adopter of DirectX 12 and uses a lot of parallel processing, it is often used as a benchmark. A controversy arose when Nvidia GPUs performed worse than AMD ones in early beta versions; this was because the game uses asynchronous compute and shading, which AMD hardware handles natively but Nvidia had to do in software.

*Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation* came out on November 10, 2016. This standalone expansion added more units, maps, structures, and interface tweaks, and raised the player count from 8 to 16. It was merged into the base game on February 16, 2017, after the split divided the player community. Players have asked for a Linux version since at least October 2016. On January 6, 2019, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said on Steam forums that a Linux version looked likely that year.