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.

Stardock released the first public beta of Ashes of the Singularity today. This new real-time strategy game, which features the first ever native DirectX 12 support, aims to deliver planetary warfare on a scale never seen before in gaming.

"In Ashes of the Singularity, gamers aren't fighting a battle, they're fighting a war," said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. "Players command thousands of units across a vast battlefield while building up their economic and technological might."

The public beta for Ashes of the Singularity allows players to command their forces in a war that has spread across much of the galaxy in the 23rd century. Players have a choice of playing either the descendants of humanity, the Post-Human Coalition, or their bitter enemy, the Substrate.

"Over the past few months we've worked closely with AMD and Nvidia to fully leverage their hardware," said Wardell. "Our alpha testers have reported substantial performance gains, which is allowing us to begin lowering the hardware requirements."

"Our goal with Ashes of the Singularity is to help introduce a new generation of gamers to real-time strategy games," said Wardell. "We want to make a game where players can invite their friends in and be up and playing relatively quickly without a lengthy explanation about how to play."

To that end, the mechanics of Ashes of the Singularity are relatively straight-forward to learn: metal and radioactives that are spread across the planet are captured by players and used to build up armies, research new technologies, and develop a powerful economy. From there, players formulate complex strategies to defeat their opponents.

Beta 1 includes single player skirmish, co-op multiplayer, ranked multiplayer, and is now available in Early Access on both Steam and GOG.

Next month, Stardock expects to release Beta 2, which will include multi-GPU support (including mixing AMD and Nvidia cards together), along with a new 3D benchmark mode.

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).

Key Features:

• The first native DirectX 12 game allowing each CPU core to command the player's GPU simultaneously, which allows for more rendered units to be displayed on screen at the same time - by an order of magnitude - than in any previous RTS game to date.
• A multi-core, real-time strategy AI that allows for excellent single player RTS gaming.
• A new native 64-bit 3D engine called Nitrous that makes full use of the features of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, allowing for thousands of light sources on screen simultaneously.
• A new type of unit group organization known as a "meta" unit that makes it easy for players to manage potentially tens of thousands of units across a world.
• Advanced Nitrous 3D engine allows players to zoom out on the map without having to transform the map into a simplified view of the battlefield.