Yea, the game's in a pretty poor state when it comes to polish (polish? Heh, CC's a looonog way to go before you can start talking about polish) and intuitive playability, but here's some alternative explanations to thosequestions:

-It's meant as a sidescrolling Action/RTS game, but the RTS part really isn't working and probably never will (I tried making a mod with actors and weapons that hardcounter each other, but the game's just too fragile for it to be any fun). You'll likely see some more strategy elements in the campaign (not real-time though) whenever that's released. For now the most fun is to be had by releasing carnage upon the AI, creating bizarre battle scenarios with friends or modding, which can be surprisingly fun if you have a decent attention span.

-I swear the "Digg" command used to work, way back before he added the Pie menu, but right now the only thing you should have your soldiers to is stand around sentrying, or possibly patrolling if they're turrets (this'll practically make them sentries that look both ways)

-Never use normal rockets to deliver soldiers to the field (modded ones might work, but not the vanillas) Both drop-crates and dropships are ok though. Also, always have the Body at the top of the list, only have One body and don't load him with too much stuff or he'll die from the impact when hitting the ground and any grenades he carries will explode.

-They answered the multi-player and skirmish-related questions pretty well I think, or at least as well as I could've.

-This might sound weird, but my main recommendation for enjoying this game while familiarising yourself with it is to either download and mess around with some crazy mods or find an earlier version. Like, while the game still was freeware, there was no pathfinding or fancy Lua scripting and the only game mode was Survival on pre-designed maps against ever-spawning AI. Because really, out of the Many, many hours I've spent with Cortex Command about 95% are either having Rocket-rocket duels with friends or making stupid non-lua mods, something that's surprisingly easy to figure out how to do (examples include a character who upon being shot fires a paper airplane in the direction the bullet came from which drops a trail of fish-shped bombs that slowly will "swim" towards the top of the screen, exploding if any rocket or dropship is unlucky enough to intercept them).

Thank you. I've been experiencing more frustration than fun playing the game with the existing scenarios. I will check out the mods.

Uh, Weegee's are about 10X as frustrating, but fun nontheless. A sense of accomplishment if you beat one of them.

You should check out UniTec. Its very balanced and really fun to play with.

If you don't want dropships you can always use Crobo's teleports.

You won't have any fun with Cortex Command and definitely with Cortex Command mods unless you are patient and take the time to play the game so you can understand controlling actors, using jet packs and the like.

It takes special finesse to burst jet around where you want to go, to aim in flight, headbutt people, consistently land rockets, somersault (B24 new!), etc. Once you are more adept at playing CC, the mods and especially custom missions (I personally mark weegee's as my favorite) become more enjoyable.

The controls scare off new players a lot. It takes longer to get used to than a flight simulator.

But the payoff is hours of fun in your own sandbox warzone, set your rules, do whatever it takes to make actors gib and bleed, and watch as the terrain melt away and replaced by enemy corpses and dropship scraps.

Imagine going back to when you're 6 playing with little toy soldiers.

I have to disagree with you there, I found it rather easy after about five minutes.



But with body parts and blood everywhere.

The controls are intuitive, the technique required is not. Some people grasp it quicker than others.

At one point I completely forgot how to play. Bad times.

I for one certainly found it a lot easier to learn than Soldat, even if only because of the jump being lame and slow to respond.
But yeah, it's fairly tricky to play to start with, although I had the advantage of messing with CC style gameplay for some time before I actually found CC.

I was playing with toy soldiers until I was 13 or 14.

Well, you are three times better at toy soldiers [assuming you started from 4 or 5].
Anyways, the problem is just jetpacking, resources, and rush ai.

But the most important thing to do is download 5 million mods. They make everything more entertaining. Some mods I recommend (all in the Mod Releases forum; you can use a Ctrl-F command to find them, though you may have to go to page 2 or 3):

Crobotech
Cordyc
MDC
Diemos Corporation
Tiberium [lulz]
Darkstorm
Shamsy
Behemoth

Crobotech's probably my favorite, although a lot of these guys are pretty overpowered. Still, it makes for some very entertaining sandbox mass destruction.