Having a closed election cuts off any ability for a better system even being possible. If both of the "candidates" can only come up with patch work or mediocre solutions then why ostracize the rest of the community from voicing their opinion or pitching an option?

I feel giving the smd a toggle to shoot down a novax is reasonable. The missiles only cost like 3.6k vs the satellites 10k to replace. If its something you can turn on then you can't use them to overwhelm the smd either and since its not economic to build smds all over the map for most of the game it protects the core base and still lets the extent mass be threatened. The sat can do its job to harass outer mexes, defend against pushes and even be an early scout.

Addendum: If needed you could even buff the sat to compensate, drop its reload from 20 secs to 16 to make it more useful as a defensive unit or to kill far units and buildings. this would raise its dps to ~300ish.

I look at recently posted to see if there's anything interesting. The fact that the only criteria I can search by are meta metrics (Name, creator name, number of games etc) and almost useless mesa knowledge (number of players and Size withstanding). Rather than anything about the map itself doesn't help me to find maps that I would find enjoyable, a lack of measured comparison makes finding maps that would otherwise be similar or enjoyable very difficult and throwing a blanket over it and pretending its not there doesn't help.

Curtailing the ability to upload doesn't either as most people are not going to go through the work of filling out an application for a game they play in their free time. Especially if they have to wait a day or two to be approved or the reviewer denies their map for personal taste reasons (people will inevitably be subjective afterall). It may instead be better to make the application opt in to gain a mapper/modder tag that is attached to any maps you make. (This shows that you have consistently made quality maps)

But that doesn't answer the question about the election terms nor on the position availability outside of current council members. Currently the way it looks people just voting themselves into power unless I'm misunderstanding your statement.

If possible I'd like to make a suggestion, instead of nuking the map vault why not use a merit based tagging system?
Instead of a simple vote which people pretty much never use (myself included) either make a prompt that appears somewhere prominent (in the corner tends to get ignored because its pretty small.) From there you have a list of tags which work like descriptors that are found on maps like reclaim heavy, dynamic, astrogap, expansion heavy, etc etc. Then after someone plays a match they have a prompt to vote on it and pick a few descriptors for it which is then displayed on the vault listing. It would make finding map types way easier.

I dont know how easy it is to do but what little programming I know it doesn't sound impossible.

Duly noted

@mach kinda, thats why its in the cybran MO. Its just a battleship gun on the bugs ass when it lands giving it some more base punching ability. I'm personally tired of the devs balancing the entire game around 2ks doing shit.

I will also still say that strapping a battleship turret to its ass if you make it land is more cybran than just making it a shittier monkey. Just give it jamming and call it a day or do something cool like make it a deployable artillery base. (It'd be cool af)

@azraeel You mean a unique ability that belong to the cybran gunship in the base game anyway?

Alternatively give it a battleship gun because it would be funny. (This is mostly a joke for legal purposes) Give it the ability to transport units like its a t3 transport.

Edit: Make it land and become stationary give it a battleship battery, land battleship.

@lorem_ipsum My main complaint is it feels out of place and would be a lot of work. Okay manual targeting is more time spent on trying to get the bug which if the "drones" (for lack of a better term) are a part of the unit they still eat the initial fire either way if the targeting makes them priority anyway.

@comradestryker Uh i didn't say to get rid of the stealth, stealth is radar based. The jammer would be visual and omni based (it creates physical entities like the drones from a kennel)

@mach if its set to experimental it will still target the decoy. So target priority does nothing and that's what torp defense already does so its not like this is unprecedented. Certainly a better option than "funny bug walk" which is just imbalanced.

Just give it a jamming field that creates a decoy unit or two. Give it build power to make the entities, it takes like 8-10 seconds to build the decoy and the decoys are "T5" for the purposes of AA targeting (they take priority over the bug.) Give it an upper limit of like 10ish entities with just enough health to eat a single sam firing cycle and boom bug is good. It makes the first pass of ASF and initial barrage of sams ineffective, EZ.

EDIT: Like the jamming crystals in the campaign and a czar, that would work. (this would also use assets that already exist rather than making new ones)

I feel giving the smd a toggle to shoot down a novax is reasonable. The missiles only cost like 3.6k vs the satellites 10k to replace. If its something you can turn on then you can't use them to overwhelm the smd either and since its not economic to build smds all over the map for most of the game it protects the core base and still lets the extent mass be threatened. The sat can do its job to harass outer mexes, defend against pushes and even be an early scout.

Addendum: If needed you could even buff the sat to compensate, drop its reload from 20 secs to 16 to make it more useful as a defensive unit or to kill far units and buildings. this would raise its dps to ~300ish.

I think posting your ideas in simple bullet points would be easier at this rate. Going back and reading this from top to bottom would take an hour best case scenario. So if possible please clean this up and make it easier to read.