Hi Greyknight,
Thanks for all the feedback! I do know the default settings have gotten a little harder with some of the changes and additions over the months. Though there are a number of hosts who enjoy the defaults, so changing them at this point would probably annoy a lot of people.
I do mean to add the ability to delay Rift Nukes and also adjust the strength of the artillery response. Just so you know, Rift Orbs (and Dooms) are vulnerable to over-charge. You can kill them quickly with one or two OC shots from your commander. Or spam T1PD under the shield, which will also quickly eliminate them.
The easiest two ways to adjust difficulty are to either increase Build Time or increase the Tech Delay setting. Of the two, I recommend the Tech Delay setting. This will delay the speed that waves tech up, giving players more time to prepare for the harder waves.
Artillery retaliation is in direct response to the power of the artillery you are building. Going for T4 artillery will trigger a stronger response. Generally a combination of artillery and satellites are effective. Building a sat + a mavor + a scathis is very effective. Sats help with targeting and eliminating individual shields/arty, scathis with eventually eliminate support structures, and mavors are good for direct damage to the HQ.
Airdrops can be heavily customized under the settings. If you are having difficulty with them, you can adjust their behavior there. And definitely still worth building AA vs the transports. The transports will drop their units early if their shields take too much damage, though some will try to reach their drop goal regardless. Building some T1PD scattered around your base is usually good enough protection from random drops that get through, until you have stronger units.
Paragons can be successfully built, but must be done quickly. Do not start a paragon if 1. Don't have the build power to use it, 2. Don't have the economy to build it quickly (you want it built in 5 mins or faster), 3. First nuke wave hasn't been launched. Violating any one of these usually results in defeat. Note, you can tone down Paragon Punishment in the settings, which will give you more time before you are overwhelmed. The punishment setting determines how much time it takes for the difficulty to ramp up after a paragon has been detected. You can also turn off the punishment completely.
Support Bases launch the Rift Nukes. Eliminating all the Support Bases will stop any further Rift Nukes. There can also be only as many Rift Orbs as there are Support Bases alive. So if you have 5 Support Bases and destroy one, the max number of Rifts that can be deployed are 4 (unless all 5 have already been deployed). Destroying Support Bases directly damages the HQ, stuns the wave, may give T4 units to players as reinforcements, and grants mass + energy to each player for a period of time. The mass and energy delivered increases with each Support Base destroyed. Eliminating all Support Bases will also cause the HQ to power stall for a period of time, which disables its shields and artillery for the duration of the power stall and causes the buildings around the HQ to begin to randomly self-destruct, weaking its defenses. Successfully eliminating all Support Bases makes it easier to kill HQ as it directly weakens the HQ and will stop Rift Nukes.
On Dooms, they are meant to be Base Breakers. They take increased damage from UEF T4 Napalm and Over-Charge shots. ACU's can do quite a bit of damage to a Doom and even stop them if the Doom is in the red. You can stop Dooms from wrecking your base by path blocking with other T4 units. Try using GCs or Megas to crash into a Doom and get them trapped in the Napalm fire to quickly kill. You will need a few T4 units to block well, and will likely lose them. The Seraphim Storm missiles are also good at dealing damage, if you can land them in the Doom's path.
The Naval Response script is relatively new and still being balanced. It is meant for maps that support navy, but either player's didn't enable navy waves because they don't know how or because there are only a few areas on the map worth using navy, so the naval waves would simply become trapped in an unimportant pond. I'll probably add an option to adjust it in the future and/or disable.