Right now, the metagame is frankly crazy easy.

For contested sites, it's simplicity itself to just use your dropship's engines to kill the mother ♥♥♥♥ before they even land; when they attack your base, same deal because the first thing to hit the dirt is a nice, defenseless brain.

If I could make a suggestion or two: it'd be nice to have some kind of invulnerability field around the brain for the first few seconds of the game, and perhaps to have shelling/missile strikes on your base in defense mode or have a powerful 'first wave' that you have to defeat before the enemy brain even shows up. At this point, it's not even a contest.

For that matter, why are the player and the AI on equal footing at all? The AI needs to cheat to make it challenging at all.

Yeah, that would be pretty nice. The brain lands and it is usually very near to my base, and since snipers are placed a lot thanks to the auto base design, the fight doesn't last much.

Brains, especially AI brains, should land with a couple of extra soldiers in the dropship with them. This goes for the player as well, but would definitely help against the bum-rushing tactic.

Perhaps an option to choose the loadout and ship type of the landing crew before you land? That way you would have to ensure you can afford the landing party and thus prevent the annoying starting-with-negative-funds as well as provide the brain with some defence

One mechanic might be ECM/ECCM: if the landing party's budget is higher than yours, they get a 'build phase' before combat starts and they can set up a small encampment/hide their brain before you know what's going on. Contrariwise, if they fail the EW phase, they get a frag shell up the rectum.

This might also be a good place to shoehorn in a minigame. Then again, seeing as CC is basically feature-complete at this point, that wouldn't happen, but it'd be lovely to have in a mod.

I was just imagining a brain "ship repellent" tool that sends ships bouncing away when they get too near the brain.

I must say. Something like that would be interesting to say the least...

The metagame becomes challenging when you put 3 AIs on the same team, against you. I recommend you give it a try, the "dropship into enemy brain" strategy will not work as well when you're fighting 3 brains at the same time.

Decided to drop in on these guys while on holiday for a change.

But seriously, no idea why he was there in the first place.

Gotta agree with this, especially when you're playing as Coa against 3 Browncoats. Browncoats are already ridiculous at shrugging off things like heavy snipers and revolver cannons and when there are 3 times as many of them the campaign becomes an actual challenge and pretty damn fun.

Ok now I'm just gonna team up a bunch of Dummy AI's and play myself some CC Horde Mode.