Hey @Rama
Me and some mates have been playing this and I've got some suggestions for it from the new player experience if you want.
First of all, the default experience should be relatively easy, or there should be a simple way to get to an easier experience, here's my thoughts on some things
- Rift nukes, either turn them off or just send them in later, probably just after you're expecting a good rushing player to get their first SMD up, we've currently got rift nukes disabled for two reasons, the first being that it's actually incredibly annoying to know how to kill them, they're hovering ground units but most T2 tanks which is what we have when the first ones come down actually can't hit them unless they're on the extreme edge of the shield, so if you just send your tanks in to deal with it they'll just stand under it and end up getting killed. The second is that we're paring it down trying to get to the point where we can just win one so rift nukes have gone.
Suggestions for these on default setting: Send in rift nukes later, reduce the hover height of the rift nuke by about 50/75%, if units are right under them sure it's fine if they can't hit them, but about half to 3/4 of the area under the shield should be fine for T2 tanks to hit them.
Have the first launched ones have weaker defences, don't know how viable this is but the fact that as far as I can tell at every point throughout the game the rift nuke itself is about as difficult to kill just turns them from a huge threat at the start of the game into a late game nuisance, although we never got to late game with rift nukes on because most of the hover height rubbish.
- Airdrops, drop way too early, way too aggressively, and are way too hard to stop them from coming down, we often lose a commander to an ACU hunter being dropped directly on the commander and killing it before the point defence we've managed to rustle up can kill the bots.
Suggestions for these:
Have the first couple of air transports significantly weaker, usually by the time that the first set of drops come in, there's absolutely no point in building anti air to try and stop them as far as I can tell because of how tanky the transports are, you need to have like 8-12 t3 anti air that start firing on it and have it crossing a decent chunk of their range to have even a hope of a chance of preventing them from dropping their bots off.
In addition the ACU hunter drops come at least one drop too early, usually we've got some basic t3 point defence in the back lines but not nearly enough to prevent the transport from dropping an ACU hunter off, last game we had a drop come in at about 15 minutes with an ACU hunter, a brick, and a percival on it and drop it right on top of one of our commanders. if it had come in even 5 minutes later I would have had enough point defence to kill the ACU hunter before it killed one of our commanders. To my mind, the earlier airdrops should punish you for not getting T2 air defence up in time or even a little t3, because that's about what you'd have at that point, but it feels more like, don't bother building air defence until after 15 minutes because nothing you can get up in that time is going to be enough to stop the airdrops so just build point defence until you can build a huge number of SAMs
- Countermeasures, it's very clever that you've programmed in that the AI gets stronger based on what the player builds, but, it feels incredibly demoralizing, as an example in the last game we attempted I built a mavor as an attempt to take out the main base before we got overwhelmed under the end game bosses, no luck because the enemy just got multiple faster firing higher damage artillery pieces for free and used them to destroy my mavors and then pound the rest of our base with impunity because we had no way to counter it, in addition their artillery was under repeatedly respawning shields.
The lesson that I took away from this was "Don't build artillery, it will lose you the game" similarly, "Don't build a paragon, it will make things worse for you", "Don't build experimental air units, it'll invite a disproportionate response", "Don't build naval, it's not worth it against the additional enemy units they send in", what the countermeasures are doing for our group just learning and trying to win a single game isn't really challenging us so much as it is saying "Just stop trying new things because all you'll find is new ways to lose the game faster"
These are just some thoughts off the top of my head based on the games that I've played so far.
The nuke timing feels right, it punishes you for not getting nuke defence up in time but also isn't too hard to get the defences up before they're required. Doom waves however we've not figured out how to stop those from just chewing our defences to hell, perhaps something like destroying the support bases weakens the waves at the end? Currently we've not really figured out what destroying the support bases is good for, yes it damages the HQ but we don't know what "You are being resupplied" does.
Overall, my suggestion is to just tone down the difficulty of all the things on the default setting, it shouldn't necessarily present a challenge to experienced players, but should be something that gives a taste of the challenges but in a toned down manner which can then be ramped up as the user finds themselves chasing more of a difficulty.
