Humanity long ago shed its mortal skin and developed into beings of pure consciousness. But the Singularity is a thing of the past and the very future of human existence is being threatened. Though the post-humans wield godlike power, they find themselves at war for domination of not just the Milky Way but all galaxies with Haalee, the sentient AI, who is bent on saving the universe from post-human predation.

Pouring your human consciousness into thousands of deadly constructs, the time has come for you to join epic confrontations where countless robotic manifestations of war smash each other into scrap only to be replaced as factories convert all available matter into a steady stream of fresh war machines. In this war for ever-more intelligence, where control of matter to fuel the expansion of computing power is the only goal, the struggle will inevitably consume the galaxy...one planet at a time.

“What makes Ashes of the Singularity special is just the sheer scale of the game," said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. “This isn't a battle, it's a war. Players are building and controlling thousands, potentially tens of thousands of units, fighting on several fronts simultaneously. The war rages across an entire planet and is part of a greater war spread across the galaxy."

To accomplish this new level of scale, the game makes use of a new type of 3D engine called Nitrous, designed specifically for modern, multi-core hardware requiring a 64-bit OS and DirectX 11 as a minimum.  It is also the first engine to natively support DirectX 12.

“Ashes of the Singularity really shows off what is possible on modern hardware,” said Dan Baker, principal graphics architect at Oxide Games. "The rendering method we use in Nitrous is essentially the same as the techniques CGI in movies have used, except on modern hardware we can do it in real-time."

Another notable feature of the game is its multi-core AI system, possibly the first in a real-time strategy game. 

"Traditionally, real-time strategy games haven't had very sophisticated AI," said Wardell. "That's because RTS's normally have their AI running on one CPU core.  In Ashes, the AI splits up all of its jobs across every core on the player's machine.  Even in Early Access, the AI provides enough of a challenge that we had to turn down the default difficulty to penalize the AI."

While Ashes of the Singularity has a strong single-player game, the game also has plenty for multiplayer fans including ranked matchmaking, a persistent game universe, personal player metagaming features, and more.

"For the past year, we've been building up a multiplayer infrastructure, said Wardell. "To lead that effort, we brought in Adrian Luff, who's had almost two decades of experience at Blizzard with Battle.net.

While the Early Access version is now available on Steam ($39.99), Stardock cautions that it isn't for everyone.

"We are still fairly early in development," said Wardell. "Only people with very high end hardware who are experienced strategy game players should consider joining Early Access. There's still lots of work to be done such as global player abilities and an additional playable race, as well as perfecting what is, after all, a very cutting edge engine. There will be bumps.  We very much are looking for player input."

A real-time strategy game on a scale never before seen, where even the smallest units have diverse, independent weapons systems on them and every shot fired has its own targeting solution and ballistics model, Ashes of the Singularity explores entirely new and engaging gameplay fundamentals coupled with jaw-dropping visuals. With literally thousands of units acting independently on screen at the same time, players are introduced to a familiar infrastructure of real-time strategy gameplay while focusing their attention not on small engagements between a handful of units, but instead waging large-scale wars across multiple simultaneous battlefronts.

Ashes of the Singularity offers innovative multiplayer alongside its epic single-player campaign that tells the tale of the Singularity and complications arising from humanity's evolution away from physical form. League structures, leaderboards, stats and other features will be announced as development continues, powered by Stardock's cloud-based Project Tachyon metagaming services (led by lead architect Adrian Luff, who helped build Blizzard's Battle.net).