Should Build Speed be Reduced?

I never intended it as the holy grail of fixing the game, but I still stand by it being one of the most important steps in the right direction. It's not so much about build speeds anyway, I think hp increases will do more. You can't just increase hp though, you have to balance that extra hp somehow otherwise you get even more blobs running around. My idea is blob size would stay the same. Yes it would take longer to get to critical mass, but units would also last longer because they would have significantly more hp. And not all units need more hp, or slower build times for that matter. I definitely think units with the more intended role of being a soak and definitely defenses need some kind of hp increase.

Random instances where I thought "Ubers communication with us has increased a lot" lately:
- during development of PA Chat I've found a bunch of bugfixes and recommened them to developers. All of them are in the game by now. I pinged them in the forums and magically the code snippets appeared in the next PTE.
- in some PTE threads I directly asked tvinita for his thoughts behind changes, he answered within hours
- jables, tvinita and sorian tend to join PA Chat on many weekdays in the last week and I've actually been able to chat a little with them about PA as well as about random stuff as well as participate in some test games on new maps that tvinita is making.
- the changes in the current PTEs very clearly show that tvinita is closely reading the forums, most of the changes have been asked for in the forums before.
- sorians stuff on his work on the AI is awesome as always, see the stream he did where he showed how he works on it or the thread where he and very actively discusses stuff with people like quitch.
- jables has started to post in the steam forums and that forum is much more civil than it was before that
... probably more, but I should sleep now and not actively search for more examples, so this is all I came up with without having to slow down writing a lot.

Thanks for taking the time to do this, it does make me feel better. I guess I was hoping for thoughts on current balance and any possible future features we can expect.

If you want thoughts on balance changes I recommend to ask them directly by doing pings like this:
@tvinita
Especially when you quote his balance changes in a PTE he tends to answer, though he told me in chat that he likes to watch peoples reactions without influencing them (by showing his own presence) to get a feeling what people think of the changes he makes.
I am pretty sure he knows what he is doing.

Which is why I am hopeful that these changes lead somewhere with brighter pastures.

That said, why not a balance stream? Maybe an hour - hour and a half long stream all about balance. Explaining what the changes are, why they made certain changes in the past, and possibly what the future plan is for the gameplay. An overarching design philosophy would be great too.

Coh2 did this for awhile and it was pretty successful among the community. As I mention earlier DD2 sort of does this with an ask me anything. I think an hour is enough, hell even a half hour is probably fine.

I believe @metabolical used to do balance streams in the past, but after the grenadier/dox debacle started to do less so. And then sadly he was laid off after the closing of the Human Resources kickstarter. =c

Those were test streams, not necessarily balance streams. They were showing off a new unit.

I want to make this a mod, well to be specific basically do this in my update to my old mod: SimplyLess.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-less-macro-gameplay-mod-to-be-edited-getting-feedback.68076/

Were they? I think he always did try to prove that the new unit was balanced. And his methods of proving equality in balancing were rather ... unconventional. Putting up a microed platoon of one unit type against an idle platoon of another unit type of same metal value. And then claim they would be equal in strength if the microed platoon did only barely win. Disregarding hybrid army compositions, stock unit behaviors or any other commonly used tactics such as using walls.

I can remember test games with metabolical on his stream.