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.

Ashes of the Singularity was generally well received but there were three criticisms leveled at the game:

1. The technology was impressive but the presentation was sometimes bland and uninspired
2. The story-driven campaign felt tacked on (mainly because the campaign was tacked on)
3. Without strategic zoom, the screen ended up filling with thousands of hard to differentiate units.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation’s story-driven campaign makes much more use the lore. See the Dawn of the Singularity book for more details, if you like Sci-Fi you’ll probably like this.

Escalation adds strategic zoom in a similar manner to what Stardock did in Sins of a Solar Empire.  This has made dealing with large armies and large maps vastly more manageable. 

"Yes, we probably should have done this originally and we may bring this back to the base game in a free update after release because it really is that useful.  We (wrongly) thought that people would be turned off by an abstracted zoomed out view of the world," said Brad Wardell, designer of Ashes of the Singularity and CEO of Stardock.

Escalation adds two entirely new environment classes to the game: Crystaline worlds and Volcanic worlds along with a top to bottom art pass across the game (the updated visuals will be provided to existing players as a free update after Escalation is released).

Lastly, the total number of units/buildings in Escalation has been nearly doubled over the base game including supporting defensive structures that can be upgraded.  The new units and structures are designed for allowing for more strategic flexibility for players.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation will be available on November 3, 2016, for $39.99 , 50% off or $19.99 for those who have the base game (whichever is cheaper).

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is an expandalone, meaning it integrates everything from the base game and the expansion together. You don't need the base game.

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:

• Massive numbers of units in the world that can be easily organized into armies that allow players to fight wars across several different fronts simultaneously.
• The world's first multi-core real-time AI allowing for a non-cheating AI that can beat most players.
• A story-driven, non-linear campaign that tells the story of a United Earth in the 23rd century.
• A focus on single player replayability while including a wealth of multiplayer features.
• The future-proofed Nitrous 3D engine whose 64-bit, multi-core foundation supports DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and multiple GPUs.