1. The new Campaign is a great step forward, but it has a very obvious bug; when all of the players other than one have a negative balance, the Campaign doesn't end in victory.

Suggested fix: just fix the bug.

2. The Campaign rewards spending on defense, but not offense. This creates a lot of obvious problems; if you can afford to buy full base defenses, the AI never has a shot.

Suggested fix: the AI, if attacking, sends down a lot more troops, or uses an Orbital Bombardment at the start of play.

3. When attacking an AI base, I've found that late-game, you may as well just buy a bunch of drop ships and use them as bombardments to destroy the base's top-side defense.

I'd like to suggest that Bombs be removed as a class, because it really is a player-only thing that AIs can't use efficiently.

To replace it, give us a feature that offense can use, called Orbital Bombardment, that consists of dropping X bombs of your choice from the sky for Y cost, where X is picked in the usual menus and Y is a ramping cost, starting at base cost and multiplied by, say, 1.01 per bomb. Bombs should be dropped at random and a 10-second wait should occur between the last bomb being generated and the start of regular play. This would allow both the AI and the human player a valid route to assault late-game bases in un-modded play and take away a tool that players can abuse really heavily but that the AI can't use worth a darn.

4. I still feel like there isn't nearly enough differentiation between the heavier and lighter troops and other objects. There's nothing that's like a tank, other than dropships, and the dropships remain a cost-effective killing device, which they probably shouldn't be.

Suggested Fix: I really think balance needs a major overhaul.

There really aren't efficient choices for area defense, anti-aircraft defense, etc. to make countering the enemy's forces more interesting.

I'd like to see a viable option of buying, say, 20 crappy robots vs. 1 juiced-up Brownshirt at the same cost; pack attacks vs. Rambo micro. Right now the only argument for the more-expensive troops is that they can carry more, but they're so crippled in terms of mobility that it's not worth it, and it just doesn't give them enough force multiplier.

There's no point in having a guy with 5 weapons if he's got all of the mobility of a snail and hardly any survivability. So why is that even an option? Why not just limit troops to X objects carried or weight carried, and give them full mobility?

There's no point at all in buying the Gatling Drone or the Dreadnought, if they cannot move more than 20 feet away from your Brain because they can't jump and still have all the aCrab problems with terrain.

These are just some examples; I feel the game's chock-full of stuff that looks tantalizingly-useful atm but actually isn't. A game design should not be 90% newbie traps.

5. You can't, as attacker, buy 20 guys, pre-equipped, in 10 dropships that arrive dispersed, and have them be already on Brain-Hunter mode at the start of play, which is what you'd do IRL (well, on a different scale, but whatever, it's a game with a low ceiling).

There is way, way, way too much micro in this game atm; the AI's improved a bit with this version but it's still feeling like I'm up against a fortress with 20 guys in it but I have to first manually bury my Brain somewhere and then slowly and laboriously deploy my forces. The game just feels very slow paced right now and a lot of frustrations remain due to terrain destruction. I'd like to see a lot more macro; the Presets are a nice step in the right direction but the dropships and the you-only-have-the-Brain at the start are both frustrations. It's especially bad for the AI, which I've never seen even get close to damaging a full base, no matter how much money it has.

6. You can convert any battlefield into a deathtrap for the AI pretty easily by scattering mines in the areas it has to pick to land in. I honestly think that the terrain and the base should get reset for each battle, otherwise it's just too easy to design defenses that are almost insta-kill vs. the AI.

7. I really feel like the Dropship concept, however cute, basically doesn't work very well to give us mass combat, which is where a lot of the fun is. I'd like to see a drop-able object that spawns a Preset troop every 30 seconds or so on bot-hunt or brain-hunt mode, depending on a toggle, and a similar object inside bases. Then it's more like a RTS, with a struggle to pick up resources enough to feed our factories and more time spent on combat, less on finagling little things.

8. We need a bot-hunt mode to replace the ever-buggy Patrol. Bots should seek other bots within 1000 pixels or so and kill them.

9. The limitation of the area you can call for new support being limited to your commander really stifles play. No. 7 would address that, by giving people an object they could land that would automate assaults and create more of a feeling of a big war instead of encouraging the player to bury their Brain and then just buy a bunch of bombers until the AI's out of money and surface troops, which wouldn't take long.

10. The bases are very poorly designed for mobility inside. Given that the bots still have trouble navigating anywhere constricted, this causes a lot problems. Making the base interior dimensions a bit bigger and getting rid of the things like ladder rungs that just exist to keep bots from moving successfully... would help a lot.

11. The Campaign mode is broken up into a lot of unnecessary segments, imo. I don't really care that my base built 100 objects, and I'd like to see that kind of thing summarized in a number over each of my bases; I don't want to watch the Scan, I just want it to be Scanned when I arrive, and it's apparently impossible to actually attack multiple locations per turn, but it's possible to schedule the attacks and waste the gold.

12. When you own a location, you should have a full Scan. It's pretty silly that you're still in FOW, imo.

13. LOS to remove FOW is really weird and super-short, and it's obvious that the bots ignore it. I find myself shooting at black squares from which shots are coming all the time.

14. Actors are still self-gibbing all the time while jetting around. I wrote a Lua mobility script awhile ago that addressed that issue amongst many others. I did note that Actors can finally pass through each other; that is a big improvement.

15. I thought if you picked a side, you were going to be limited on tech you could buy? I don't see that happening over here. That needs to work correctly; amongst other things, it'll finally force the sides to get balanced properly and differentiated wisely. It's still basically like Skirmish, except the AI only buys one type of thing and the player gets anything they want. That pretty much just hoses the AI, because the factions aren't at all balanced right now.

16. The gold-digging AI remains pretty much unable to do its job effectively. The whole gold-digging mechanic is troublesome to begin with, because it involves terrain destruction and is a complex problem, but it's got to work well enough that the AI can and does deploy a lot of miners successfully or it's just too easy to run them down on resources, or it should get removed, imo.

One alternative is to just give the AI free money every second, so that it's effectively removed from having to bother with that issue. TBH, I'd rather see some sort of automated mining that simply collects gold within a couple hundred pixels to either side of a mining object, regardless of depth, so that mining is like planting a flag or controlling a resource in a typical RTS. Again, it's an issue of micromanagement taking us away from the fun part.

17. Seems like the number of Actors is still tied to the number of dropped objects. Really needs to be fixed; if 90 weapons are lying around, it should not be eating into total squad cap. I'll be modding out dropped objects staying around again when I get bored enough, but it just shouldn't work like that anyhow.