Should Units Be Durable or Squishy?

Nice choice of a island map with races that lack T1 amphib. tanks.

Not a biased example at all. Not in the slightest.

Given that I just linked a playlist of a tournament of 34 games played on about eleven different maps with all four factions featured, I don't know why you're talking about the first game only.

Forgive me for not watching an entire tournament based on one line of rebuttal.

Part of the enduring appeal of SupCom is the way that constructions at various regions about the map can create more points of interest. This is a mode of gameplay that should be played up as much as possible, by adding more types of positionally interesting assets, and making them easier to acquire, and faster to build. Things which add texture to the board.

There aren't only two, or four, or six points of interest. Players should be able to make as many as they want to, barring the other player destroying them at least.

I don't know about you but I always find those tasty mass points scattered around the map quite interesting. Some I want to build a mex on, some I want to take and hold, some I want to raid to limit my opponent's economy, some I want to defend.

I will side with big guns.
Decent damage, units dying in several hits to other units of equivalent tech level. dont want everything to be instakill but at the same time, awesome seeing units exploding everywhere..

When I read all of the OP, just one thing went through my mind:

Variable unit size, health and damage. From units already deployed.

Let's say, for example, that big guns in PA are good against buildings, but too slow to deal with numerous units. What could happen in a sticky situation, where a big unit was attacked by several small ones, would be that one or more of your big units, purposefully chosen for that ability, split itself into a bunch of smaller units to deal with the new threat.

These smaller units would be able to deal with unit threats more effectively, but be far weaker each than the unit that made them.They would also have the ability to join back into the big unit, but only if there were as many of them as were produced by the big unit. So you could sacrifice some of several base busting units to have a more versatile army, and maybe get some of them back after the small units did their jobs.

However, as these units are so much more versatile, they should drop off in toe-to-toe combat with similar numbers of units.

This, coupled with some variety of unit sizes from the standard ones, would provide a wealth of death, while still having tough units to beat on each other for a while.

The crucial measure is whether units are durable enough that they can walk right past your army or defenses, critically damaged or not, and deal damage to important structures. Ideally they need to be squishy enough to be forced to deal with threats lest they be destroyed now (not ground down later).